Hyangmok Baik

Provenance: Directly from the artist

Born in Seoul in 1990, Hyangmok graduated from Hongik University with a master's degree in Fine Arts. Hyangmok held his first solo exhibition at Ghana Art Space in 2016 and has since held numerous domestic and international solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, LA, and London.

Life experiences, religious themes, and memories are the central themes to the artist's work and the fragmented memories between the conscious and the unconscious create afterimages that appear in the artist’s work.

In terms of technique, the repetitive process of covering, painting, and combining different layers of media on canvas represents the accumulation of time and memories.

In Baik’s most recent work, Love Me, Love my Bird, the signature blank stares of the three male figures, which are known to be self- portraits, invite the viewers to form their own sense of feeling and create their own translation of the narrative. While the blank stares seem to express a sense of emptiness, the title of the work itself evokes a sense of loneliness and desire love, highlighting Baik’s reoccurring theme of Utopia, a world filled with love in which he refers to “The Garden of Eden.”