JongHeon Bae: The Clearing After The Rain on a Sleepless Night

About the exhibition

The paintings in this show start gold. JongHeon Bae covers the surface in deep blue, then sweeps or scrapes it back, so mountains, rocks, clouds and water appear through removal rather than drawing.

The two colors do different jobs. Blue is more than night: it strips things of their everyday color and pulls them toward memory and imagination. Gold suggests an ideal world that stays out of reach and so keeps drawing longing. That world is not invented here. It was under the paint from the start.

The title joins two words. Jesaek is the clear light on mountains and rivers once rain or snow has passed. Bae used it for the 2019 show MiJangJeSaek, which found peaks and valleys in marks on concrete and building surfaces. Bulmyeon means sleeplessness, and this show moves that way of looking into the hours when everyone else is asleep and memory, thought and sensation overlap.

Sungkok Art Museum reads sleeplessness as more than a personal experience: a habit of watching what seems empty until a form emerges. What sansu, the traditional landscape, means today then becomes less a question of subject than of how we look at the world.

About the artist

JongHeon Bae was born in 1969. Korean press reports a solo show at Alternative Space Loop in 2023, after the Glenfiddich Artist in Residence program in Dufftown, and the Park Dong-jun Award in 2024. Sungkok Art Museum describes a turn from concept-based installation to painting in the mid-to-late 2010s.

Sources: Sungkok Art Museum: exhibition page · design.co.kr · Maeil Shinmun