After studying sculpture at Kyungnam University in South Korea, Seungsoo Baek arrived in France in 2006. He obtained a master's degree in Fine Arts from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris in 2007. That same year, he began working with the Swedish figurative sculptor Gudmar Olovson (1936-2017). Working alongside him for 10 years, he developed a different approach to sculpture, one that was less academic and more wholehearted.
His artistic universe was initially figurative, but then changed in the light of abstract artists such as Pierre Soulages, Cy Twombly and Mark Rothko, as well as sculptors like Antony Gromeley and, of course, Gudmar Olovson.
At the heart of Seungsoo Baek's practice is the line. The line gives rise to series, or a ‘succession of processes’ that oblige the artist to be reborn, in a new spirit but in the continuity of previous work. There are dense, difficult, precise and repetitive series, such as the ‘Black Series’, and those, known as the ‘Liberation Series’, such as the ‘Magnetism Series’, where the gesture is set free in a lively spirit, but always controlled and harmonious.
This research is expressed through a variety of techniques: drawing, sculpture, installations, painting on canvas using different materials: polystyrene, acrylic or elastomer.
Baek wants to paint the immaterial, the things of the spirit, and to do this he draws on the writings of Freud, Lacan and Kant, which infuse the Confucian thought in which he has been immersed since childhood. His art is then the application of conscious and unconscious phases, between light and darkness, dream and solitude.
« You have to search, strive to be reborn again and again, to be in perpetual motion so that one day you arrive somewhere. The original colour was ‘black’, and I like this shade because it has something ‘neutral’ about it. My intention is that you should approach my work without any particular expectations, that you should simply let yourself be impregnated by a sensation. The colours and nuances come later. »
From his culture in the Far East, he has retained the tireless repetition of the same gesture: ‘I like to make countless drafts, then observe them until I see an idea appear, something new’.
This contemporary material, light and flexible, might seem to contradict an idea of ancestral work, but it is the fruit of Seungsoo Baek's research and multiple influences.