Critics
Excerpted from 'Bae, Joon Sung’s Museum Series'
Rhee, Ji Eun(Professor, Art History, Myongji University)
Audience
You see an exhibition hall of The state Hermitage Museum in Russia. It is one of the top three museums in the world. There is nothing particular for an exhibition hall in the room crowded with visitors. Among the people, one lady is looking at the ceiling on which there is a painting of Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), (1887). The painting is based on one of Plutarch’s stories. There are some women sleeping on the market street after enjoying the Bacchus festival. Amphissa, at that time, was at war with Phosis. It was a very dangerous town and the security was bad. The women of Amphissa are guarding the sleeping ladies protecting them from attack by soldiers. Plutarch’s story tells us a moral; however, the painting doesn’t seem to be instructive. The attractive poses of women in ancient clothing prove that the artist’s interest is not based on the history but on the romantic imagination of the 19th century. However, if we look at the picture more closely, we can find that the painting is not Alma-Tadema’s work. It is Bae, Joon Sung’s lenticular in the series of The bodies in light Greek clothes swayed by the wind are those of Asian women. The lady who is looking at the painting on the ceiling is also an Asian woman. Is that the ancient Greek atmosphere or the Asian body in it which catches her eyes?
Compared with other works of Museum Series, the viewer is given a great weight in this painting. The woman is looking at the ceiling unlike other visitors who is looking around the hall. The ones who are watching this painting naturally pay attention to this lady’s eyes as well as a lenticular on the ceiling. We are watching her ‘act of watching.’ Then, all of a sudden, we become the woman in the painting and look at Bae’s lenticular in her eyes. Of course, she is not actually in Hermitage nor is Bae’s lenticular. The artist, as always, created a new context, a composition of different images. As the layer of images gets thicker, the woman becomes an important clue. As a tongueslip can show one’s real intention, the sight of this woman points out that the artist’s interest now moves to the relation between art and its audiences. The painting is about the relationship between an artwork and viewers, and the space of exhibition where they meet.
Bae, Joon Sung has steadily showed his interest in audiences. He, as an artist and a passionate audience of western classic paintings, always cares about the pleasure of ‘seeing’ Painters of neo-classicism like Jacques-Louis David and Dominique Ingres, John Singer Sargent, an American portrait painter of high classes, and Alma-Tadema who liked to paint the ancient world in romantic style: Bae is familiar with such western painters even more than old and famous Korean painters like Kim, Hong Do and Shin, Yun Book. Of course, I don’t have to talk about the nationalism here stating his taste. While ‘Korean things’ represented by Kim, Hong Do and Shin, Yun Book stay in the space and time of the ‘past,’ the collections of western paintings are lying by the side of the artist, at this moment. Born in 1967, Bae belongs to so-called the 386 generation. It was not Bodhisattva images in the meditation pose but the busts of Agrippa and Venus that he came into in the mid 80s when he studied art hoping to enter the western art department in the college. It was the collections of western masters that Bae read studying oil painting. During the time, Bae had interest in the process of the masters’ works rather than in their detailed expressions and vivid colors.
The way of watching a painting for Bae is to try to paint it by himself. The vinyl series of show this. In , the process of appreciation always comes before that of painting. To digest a painting, borrowing his words, the “honey coating” enhancing the taste of delicious part of the work should be done first. The delicious part for Bae was the clothes that the artist had described. While expression of the face of a portrait is limited by the real model, that of garments and accessories can be decided by the artist. Unlike the head’s smooth surface, the clothes become the space where the artist can enjoy the pleasure of painting through the use of bold brush strokes, expressive material description, and shiny accessories hung on them. Bae copies this part, his favorite, putting a vinyl cover on the nude picture which shows the same poses as those in the original work. Then, he appreciates the taste of honey turning the watering tongue here and there in the mouth. As the hidden skin is revealed, paintings of Van Dyck, Vermeer, and Waterhouse are uncovered. The process from the sketch to the coloring is exposed, deconstructed, and then recovered through Bae’s tongues or brushes. The process of production is again excavated by audiences because of the nature of the material, vinyl. When we take off the clothes in the well-known classic works, the Asian bodies appear. This unexpectedness and unfamiliarity we find from the familiar things confuse our sight and change the context of painting.