Bae Young-hwan, a beloved artist who represented his home country of Korea at the 2005 edition of the Venice Biennale, died on June 19 at 57. His Seoul representative, Gallery BB&M, did not state a cause in its announcement of his passing on June 20, which described Bae’s death as “sudden.”
He was most widely known for his artworks that appropriated lyrics from Korean pop songs. Remaking those lyrics from pain medications, disinfectant, and cotton used to soothe wounds, Bae critiqued the optimism of these songs, suggesting that the hope offered by those words was only a temporary patch in the quest to fix a perennial sense of sadness afflicting Korean society.
Born in 1969, Bae attended Hongik University in Seoul, where he received an eduction in traditional Asian painting styles. He would go on to eschew that education and take up conceptual art, showing it in vaunted Korean art institutions such as Alternative Space Pool, Art Sonje Center, and what is now known as the Leeum Museum of Art.
In 2002, Bae exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale, one of the top biennials in Asia, where he showed a work from his “Pop Song” series. Titled Pop Song 3: Gwangju Sangmudae, this work centered around the connections between pop music and the push for democracy in 1980s Korea.
“A central figure in the generation that gained international recognition in the early 2000s, Bae—alongside close friends and colleagues like Lee Bul, Park Chan-kyong, and Haegue Yang—was renowned for conceptually incisive work that bridged Korea’s complex artistic legacy with global discourses on modernity and society,” BB&M wrote in its obituary. “Across painting, sculpture, and public interventions, he created a body of work deeply attuned to an authentic vernacular of the Korean experience.”
