Hyangmok Baik: I Know What You Did Last Summer

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Over the Influence is pleased to announce I Know What You Did Last Summer, a new series of paintings by South Korean artist Hyangmok Baik. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery and his first presentation in Hong Kong.

This exhibition continues the utopian narrative Baik has been exploring since the start of the pandemic, and the subject of his Los Angeles show, The Garden of Eden (2021).

For the works in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Baik delves deeper into ideologies around the pursuit of pleasures and happiness in pre-pandemic era, with a fresh, contemporary and invigorated purview.

Departing from the notion of the utopia itself, the Hong Kong exhibition explores notion of possibility and things that may and could happen within a utopia. Various symbols and animals, like unicorns and tigers, are depicted to create mesmerising and an often-bewildering array of personal affects and scenery within a single canvas.

 Baik’s playful symbolism, vibrant compositions and keen use of color convey a range of emotion, and allude to possible narratives both within and outside the canvases themselves.

The artist combines bold colors, flattened perspective, and raw moments throughout his canvases. By layering various color blocks, adding a subject, erasing, adding color blocks again, drawing, erasing, and layering again, the resulting compositions are depicted honestly and without artifice.

The raw, heavily-worked surfaces and unpredictable color schemes are juxtaposed with uncanny arrays of flora, palm trees, fantastical animals, people and things—resulting in a teeming entanglement of elements as absurdly incongruous as they are unexpectedly harmonious. Baik’s graphic, angular figures yearn for a utopian world filled with familiar, trivial, and pleasure-centric activities, such as dancing, swimming, smoking a cigarette, loving each other, or just simply having fun together.

Through these motifs the artist is able to harness the raw feelings in each figure’s expression, while simultaneously remaining both ahistorical and hazily familiar. Hyangmok Baik suggests a feeling of depaysement on the canvas where this nostalgic pre-pandemic utopia world unfolds.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Born in 1990 in South Korea, Hyangmok Baik received his MA in Fine Art from Hongik University in 2019. Diving into the art world by quitting his stable job, Artist Hyangmok Baik shares his celebrative and liberating perspective on life through his painting.

Through the flattened screen with doodle-like figures, rough touches, and unexpected compositions, Hyangmok creates his own world filled with freedom on canvas. There’s no such thing as rules or strict standards in his world that he creates. Hyangmok’s piece provides a room to relax and stay curious for the viewers with his outstanding toned down color palette, and by boldly leaving out the projection of narrative.

Through his solo show “Imagine Utopia'' in gallery STAN, he shared his concept of utopia during the era of the pandemic with the viewers by highlighting the hope that resides in our future. With his warmth and humor, Hyangmok’s piece comes as a vacation, rest, energy, and hope to the people.