Book Description

The book covers five photography series which Chan-Hyo Bae has worked on so far, Self-Portrait, Fairy Tales, Punishment, Witch Hunting and the new series Jumping into the Oil Paintings. Each series have been divided into individual categories but the book’s editing shows that all series are above the same photographic context. As the artist had been fiercely living as a stranger in the U.K. but was unable to be absorbed and experience alienation and anger as an Asian living in Western culture, his artistic challenge to the meta discourse of Western culture became the key word of this series of work. Meanwhile, Jumping into the Oil Paintings is an extension of Existing in Costume but also a very different attempt. In terms of the formality of the work, Existing in Costume is a process that visualizes the artist's feelings of prejudice and alienation through elaborating exquisite plan and production, while Jumping into the Oil Paintings do not simply damage but deconstruct the subject's essence by gilding on the printed photography or by copying the paintings images and transfer it to animal skins. His new series could be seen as a way more aggressive challenge to the system of Western thought and through this, we might carefully gauged the direction of his future works. This photography book which contains 52 works from five series include articles of Kim Hong-hee, the art critic and the previous director of Seoul Museum of Art and also Bill Kuenhoven’s article, who has executive capacity in international photography scene since he had been worked as an editor of several major photography magazines for the past 20 years including Hotshoe Inernational. Thus, those articles will support an in-depth understanding of the artist’s works, has a meaning as a publication aiming at overseas photography experts and readers.