Landscape as Representation and Form

By Kang Seon-Hak (Art Critic)

Bae Ji-min’s work is landscape. It features buildings, main streets, alleys, shops, and figures that can be seen in any city. The scenery shifts between village landscapes along a hillside road, boats, and the streets of the city and the fish market. Between the boats and the hillside road, there is a pier, and the scene of Jagalchi Market is depicted. This directional gaze runs through the entire exhibition, guiding the viewer’s experience of the works. However, this landscape is far removed from the constructive form depiction or realistic representation commonly encountered in traditional painting. While there are elements of representation, they are mostly loosely captured with a brush. The landscape is deconstructed by the spontaneous nature of the ink or brushstrokes, pulling the viewer’s gaze beyond mere representation into the realm of abstraction and emotional immediacy.

The rooftops and walls of multi-family houses, seemingly pieced together in fragments, lean against one another, responding to each other across narrow alleyways. The houses, seemingly hurriedly captured, spread across the canvas as if trying to encompass the entire hillside road. The landscape, following the steep incline, functions both as structure and content, as an element and as a whole. In this tight alley, cars are parked, and figures are rendered with simple lines, their weary gaits depicted alongside laundry drying on rooftops, utility poles, bathhouse chimneys, air conditioner units, and windows—props that bring the <scenes of Sampokdoro> and <SKY Village> to life. It is a structure that seems endless, expanding in all directions—up, down, left, and right. This is a spatial sense in Bae Ji-min’s landscape that cannot be overlooked.

The sparse structure and forms created with ink lines and ink tones make it difficult to discern the concrete reality of the landscape, despite the geographical characteristics and preconceived notions of the hillside village. Unless one associates the village with names like Gamcheon-dong or Sujeong-dong, it appears simply as a roughly composed scene of an ordinary neighborhood. It becomes an abstraction of a village, reconfigured sculpturally. What stands out are the ink and lines leading the composition, the rough, thick layers of ink, and the delicate reactions of dark ink that blend into the light ink wash.

Bae Ji-min’s figures appear in various scenes: in <Waiting>, a solitary figure sits on a boat, cigarette in hand; in <The Father>, someone smokes alone, stepping away from the village road; in <The Light and Shadow of the Flame>, a figure loiters in the street; in <Late Return>, another figure passes through the city. There is also the passenger in <Fish Market> passing through the muddy marketplace or the worker carrying goods in <Jagalchi Market>. These figures are small elements within the overall composition, yet they stand out particularly. The simplicity of the background landscapes, with their minimal shapes and lines, and the contrasting slow and fast brush movements, naturally draw attention to the figures. This may be due to the fact that the figures are active subjects, thus fulfilling their role in carrying the movement of the piece. The intention to represent reality becomes more evident through the figures. They stand in contrast to the simplified strokes of the background, responding to the impulsive and arbitrary nature of the brushwork with concrete reality. This creates a distinct contrast with the approach to depicting the neighborhood landscape.

At this point, it is unclear whether Bae Ji-min’s work aims to reveal reality or to provide a formal interpretation. There is no need for the painting to narrate a specific event. However, if one disregards the reality revealed through the subject matter, it would suggest that no meaning has been extracted from the subject itself, or that it is merely a completion of reality. Transforming the place of a marginalized area into an aesthetic object could be seen as a sign of the artist’s weak awareness of reality. On the other hand, one could argue that the artist aimed for an emotional response rather than direct expression or conceptual depiction of events. However, if the place, as a proper noun, is not made concrete, reality is reduced to the monotonous hue of ink, and the context of the landscape vanishes. While there is no need to exaggerate the harshness of reality, if there is no clear recognition or attitude toward it, then the reasons for choosing the subject and sketching the scene are difficult to justify. The subject is, after all, the artist’s worldview, content, and the foundation of their method.

[…]

As with many paintings or photographs that take the landscape as their subject, the landscape here is not a given element of place, but rather a construct shaped through the act of viewing. Even actual, physical locations are not presented as landscapes in and of themselves; instead, they emerge as displaced configurations—within the frame of the painting, or from the viewer’s own situated gaze. In this sense, the landscape, typically associated with lyricism, is at times imbued with an intense and dramatic narrative.

The high-rise buildings of the city, the streets, and the backs of figures situated along those streets do not assert their presence within the scene so much as they embody the act of observing it. They are rendered as others, as third-person entities, objectified and distanced. They become subjects of the viewer’s gaze. Through such compositions, Bae Jimin seeks to evoke meanings that extend beyond the immediate reality—deeper, more resonant layers of interpretation. Yet, it is precisely this pressing, unrelenting reality that asserts itself within the work, refusing to be transcended.

Nevertheless, the inherent receptivity and gentle bleeding of hanji—traditional Korean paper—demand a single, unbroken stroke. This material quality calls forth a vitality in the brush line, compelling the artist to act with immediacy, to capture the essence of form and emotion in a single, decisive gesture. Unlike the deliberate processes of construction, accumulation, and synthesis often found in Western painting, this mode of working is one of release—of allowing the emotional current to surge forth, pressing itself into the paper with intuitive force. It is an encounter with the world through lightness, through spontaneity, through ki (기, vital energy) rather than weight.

Intuition here is not merely a method, but a moment of realization—where image becomes both vessel and medium, bridging the self and the world. In this sense, Bae Jimin’s work resonates with the aesthetics of East Asian painting, where the invisible is often more present than the seen, and where the brush seeks not to replicate appearances, but to evoke spirit and atmosphere. From objects and landscapes—indeed, from their illusions—she draws forth internal images, imbued with freedom, fleeting yet profound. These are not depictions, but glimpses: of a world moving between reality and the mind’s eye.

In this practice, seeing becomes painting itself—bypassing the time-consuming processes of observation, waiting, refinement, and interpretation that define representational drawing. It is not an act aimed at the reproduction of a visible object, but rather an expression of the moment where the artist’s sensibility intersects with the world. Here, looking is revealed as an active gesture of expression. The image is not defined by what can be reproduced, but by what can be enacted; the picture plane, thus, distinguishes itself from the landscape as a site, and instead explores the visibility of the image as something that does not presuppose depiction. It seeks to render meaning in alignment with the very form of expression. What is absent in the landscape—the real—is made possible through the medium of ink and brush.

“There is meaning in every roll, press, dot, and stroke,” said Wang Xizhi, a saying preserved not merely as a relic of antiquity, but as a living sensibility.

(Chang Fa, History of Chinese Aesthetics, trans. Baek Seung-do, Pureunsoop, 2012, p.311)

As we have briefly observed, works such as <Beginning>, <Sanbok Road>, and <Jagalchi Fish Market> translate the tension between reality and representation into form and image. Ink and hanji become more than material—they conjure an entirely new space. It is not a world constructed or mimetically reproduced, but one that surpasses the image itself. In Bae Jimin’s handling of subject matter, there is a consistent focus not on the content that might be expected from a given scenery, but on securing a space in which the brush and ink may flow freely. Her aim is not to recreate reality, but to harmonize with the unique characteristics of the hanji, brush, and ink. It is a pursuit of freedom from the object, and a will to step beyond the fixed meanings of reality.Between the poles of representation and deconstruction, between simplification and description, her work searches for a new topography. This terrain is defined by a disjunction—between form and reality, between word and the real—and yet it is no less real for that. It is, at once, a gaze cast beyond the everyday and an articulation of how Bae Jimin encounters the world through the act of painting.