Wandering: Meditative Landscapes by Korean Photographer Bae Bien-U

Description

Axel Vervoordt Gallery presents the exhibition Wandering, featuring a selection of intimate, small works by the Korean photographer Bae Bien-U.

Bae is renowned for creating meditative landscape photographs, which have an almost calligraphic quality about them. The recurrent theme behind his photographs is a reflection on communion and the possible osmosis of man with nature, with which we must live in harmony.

Bae began taking pictures in the 1970s using traditional analog techniques. From 1980 till 2000, he made us of cameras and film of the highest quality, developing his photographs in a dark room and printing them via gelatin silver process on high-quality papers.

These traditional prints are created with glossy photo paper and non-glossy warm tone Ektalure photo paper, which is currently unavailable as Kodak stopped the production of this particular paper in 2000. The hand-crafted process creates an utterly unique effect: certain spots from the chemicals and dust holes in the prints had to be manually filled by the artist.

Every photograph at the exhibition is unique, as no other editions of these photographs were ever printed in this small format. They consist of different series: Seascapes, Sonamu (Pine Trees), and Orum (Windscapes).

Born in Yeosu, South Korea, in 1950, Bae Bien-U graduated from the Arts and Industrial Design Department of Hong-Ik University. A leading photographer in Korea, his work features in several public and private collections around the world.