Hyangmok Baik South Korea, b. 1990

Hyangmok Baik's work extends a tradition of bold, almost post-aesthetic contemporary painting. His layered canvases combine flattened perspectives, heavily worked surfaces, and unpredictable colour schemes with irreverent subject matter drawn from biblical, mythological, and art-historical references. Figures that recall the canon of academic painting are reinterpreted through a contemporary lens and interwoven with everyday or anachronistic elements, creating deliberate dissonances between the sacred and the mundane. Through recontextualization and a fair amount of dark humour, Baik’s works blur the boundaries between classical imagery and contemporary life.