Bae Young Whan  (b. 1968, Seoul)

Young Whan Bae, Heart of Man(2009), 2 channel slide projection, no sound, Courtesy of the Artist

Bae works with the emotions and sentiments of ordinary people in Korea, more specifically, those who are socially under-privileged or outcasts but also those who may be slow or unwilling to catch up with the fictive reality of Korea. Bae catalyzes feelings such as grievance, bitterness, remorse, disillusionment, fatigue, and sorrow into an expressive plastic language made from materials collected in the street. Bae¡¯s materials are selected as signifiers of emotional, historical and political locality, rather than as counter-cultural objects of aesthetics and cultural politics. Bae¡¯s sentimental realism derives from a personal disillusionment with the failed democratization movement, the pervasive paradigm of ideology, and now with capital. Bae sustains the collective state of despair by committing himself to a lifelong project series dedicated to the people, nature and everyday life of Korea. Previous series, Pop Song, Way of Man, the newest series Heart of Man, and the ongoing public project series grouped under Rainbow Projects will all be brought together as chapters of an overarching project entitled Beauty of Korea.

Bae¡¯s new work, the first piece in the series Heart of Man, points to the sense of uncertainty, anxiety and anger of Korean youths who struggle to individualize a normal prototype of man prescribed by the state. In Korea where a strong militarism, state security policy, Confucian patriarchy and ethno-nationalism permeate the entire society, a ¡°normal Korean man¡± is a socio-political and ideological term, rather than a gender specific term. Undertaking a man¡¯s role in Korea implies, while curbing individual autonomy, being an agent serving the norms and values imposed by the state, tradition and family system. With this framework, the compulsory three-year military service applying to all male citizens in Koreais the first official initiation process for youths to ¡°become¡± men and individual autonomy starkly clashes with the collective discipline by the state. Because the military assumption of ultimate control over individuality is itself absurd, the military is also the site that triggers emotional repulsion in its raw and deformed way, and this produces many private ¡°traditions¡± among the servicemen. One of those private traditions, presented here as a slide projection, is a military scrap book made collaboratively by all the servicemen of a unit as a kind of military memorabilia to send off a fellow soldier who has completed his term. They not only express personal envy, jealousy, desires and wishes for the departing soldier, but also projected doctrines that have become exaggerated.