Seungjoon Baek
(He/Him)
Baek SeungJoon is an artist who uses photography, video, and installation to explore the invisible aspects of human nature through documented records and constructed narratives. His practice examines how elements such as ego, identity, and interpersonal relationships are formed, transformed, and continuously reshaped within contemporary society.
By expanding lens-based media into physical space, he brings overlooked existences and conditions that often remain unseen in everyday life into focus. Through his work, he questions the invisible structures and emotions that shape the human experience.
What Does the Sky Say to You
This series uses photography and installation to explore the unstable states of image, material, and time. The work repeatedly returns to the sky—a quiet but persistent subject observed throughout my time in Glasgow from within an interior room. During a period of profound isolation and emotional stasis, the shifting sky outside the window emerged as the sole observable register of time passing, providing a continuous, luminous contrast to the heavy inertia within.
This experience of time—defined by both stillness and impermanence—shapes the material logic of the work. Rather than treating photography as a fixed representation, the series translates this psychological and temporal fragility into physical form. Photographs of the sky, printed on fabric, are submerged in a mixture of water and gelatin within acrylic boxes. These constructed environments act as architectural mirrors to the isolated room itself. Within these enclosures, the image is never entirely fixed. As the fabric slowly dissolves and the ink bleeds into the gelatin, the photograph physically surrenders to entropy.
Through this systematic breakdown, the work questions the ontology of photography itself. The image is no longer understood as a stable, indexical record, but as a vulnerable condition that is constantly becoming. Images are not fully determined at the moment of production; instead, they continue to be shaped by internal and external forces—duration, material degradation, and the slow collapse of their own structural logic. Through repetition and accumulation, certainty shifts into variation, instability, and drift.
By holding these dissolving images within confined spaces, What Does the Sky Say to You creates an environment where photographs exist suspended between observation and transformation. The series maintains a delicate tension between control and surrender, presenting the photographic image not as a past event preserved, but as a continuous, living process of dissolution and becoming.
Reactive dye print on cotton duck, acrylic box, plinth Each: 72 × 200 × 250 mm (acrylic box), 300 × 300 × 1200 mm (plinth)
Reactive dye print on cotton duck, acrylic box, plinth Each: 72 × 200 × 250 mm (acrylic box), 300 × 300 × 1200 mm (plinth)
Reactive dye print on cotton duck, acrylic box, plinth Each: 72 × 200 × 250 mm (acrylic box), 300 × 300 × 1200 mm (plinth)
Reactive dye print on cotton duck, acrylic box, plinth Each: 72 × 200 × 250 mm (acrylic box), 300 × 300 × 1200 mm (plinth)
Reactive dye print on cotton duck, acrylic box, plinth Each: 72 × 200 × 250 mm (acrylic box), 300 × 300 × 1200 mm (plinth)
