Bae Joon-sung

Installation View (1)

Gallery Joeun is pleased to present The Costume of the Painter – On the Stage, a solo exhibition by Bae Joon-sung, on view from April 30 to May 30, 2026.

Centered on the artist’s seminal series The Costume of the Painter and On the Stage, the exhibition examines Bae Joon-sung’s sustained exploration of the essence of painting and expanded modes of visual perception. Through these works, viewers are invited to encounter the fluid process by which the act of seeing an image gives rise to another painting.

Installation View (2)

Unfixed Painting, the Stage of Bae Joon-sung Unfolds
Bae Joon-sung is an artist who has expanded the very experience of viewing images by combining lenticular techniques with traditional painting. In his work, the image does not remain as a single fixed scene. Depending on the viewer’s gaze and position, the surface changes, and painting is transformed from a static object into a field of sensation that is continuously generated and varied.

This visual experience originates from the artist’s childhood memory of “transforming desk mats,” whose images changed depending on the viewing angle. The sense that a familiar image could appear entirely different under changing conditions later became an important point of departure that runs throughout his painterly practice.

Bae Joon-sung, The Costume of Painter -at the glyptothek1…, 227.3 x 181.8 cm, lenticular and oil on canvas, 2026

His representative series, The Costume of the Painter, reconfigures images from classical painting by summoning them into contemporary time and space. The artist brings the figures, garments, and backgrounds of old master paintings into the context of the present, endowing familiar images with new tension and meaning. Here, the “painter’s costume” is not merely an object of representation. It is a layer overlaid by the painter’s gaze, and closer to an event that arises in the process of painting.

The act of observing and translating a subject is not a simple act of replication, but a generative process that gives rise to another image, and the form thus created in turn calls for a new painting. It is precisely within this repetition and circulation that Bae Joon-sung’s work reveals painting not as a completed result, but as a state of continuous renewal.

Bae Joon-sung, on the stage -from smashed 3, 145.5 x 112.1 cm, oil, spray paint, acrylic panel and acrylic on canvas, 2025

Another major axis of his practice, the series On the Stage, focuses on the relationship between the conditions and actions that arise in the process of painting. The artist explores how one action creates new conditions, how those conditions in turn induce the next action, and how, ultimately, images and scenes unfold in a sequential chain. Here, painting exists not as the result of reaching a conclusion, but as an event in which generation and dissolution, connection and expansion, continue without pause.

Images that may appear unrelated to one another are likewise newly connected within this flow, and meaning, rather than remaining fixed, repeatedly undergoes formation and dissolution. For Bae Joon-sung, painting is not a completed answer, but the very process of continual opening and change.

Bae Joon-sung, The costume of painter-traces of a. tadema1, 162.2 x 130.3 cm, lenticular and oil on canvas, 2026

In this exhibition, The Costume of the Painter and On the Stage transform painting from a fixed object into a living process through a chain of events arising from the painter’s gaze and actions. Images are constantly generated and dismantled, and within that flow, painting exists in a state of perpetual renewal.

Bae Joon-sung, on the stage -tree story, time to dive 5, 116.8 x 91.0 cm, oil on canvas, 2026

Through this exhibition, viewers will come to experience that their own gaze and movement before the image also become part of the work. Within the flow of images, where generation and dissolution intersect, they encounter painting no longer as a static object, but as a living field of sensation.

Installation View (3)

Bae Joon-sung graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University and from its graduate school, and in 2000 received the Today’s Young Artist Award. His works are held in the collections of major public institutions in Korea and abroad, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), the Seoul Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in France, and the Musée d’Orsay. His work has also been actively presented through major international art fairs, including Frieze and Art Basel, and has received sustained attention through its inclusion in the collections of internationally renowned collectors such as Bernard Arnault, Chairman of the LVMH Group, François Pinault, Chairman of the Kering Group, and actor Brad Pitt.