Hyangmok Baik: Have You Ever Fallen in Love?
193 Gallery is pleased to present Hyangmok Baik’s first solo exhibition in Paris. This marks his inaugural solo presentation with the gallery, following his participation in the group exhibition How It’s Going, curated by Andy Dixon in November 2024 at 193 Gallery Paris, as well as the presentation of his work at Untitled Art Fair in Miami in December 2025 and at Art SG in Singapore in January 2026.
Hyangmok Baik (born 1990, South Korea) develops a painting practice built on dense, tactile surfaces that engages with traditional hierarchies of representation. His canvases are constructed through layered compositions, flattened perspectives, and shifting colour relationships, resulting in images that feel both immediate and in constant tension. Drawing on biblical, mythological, and art-historical sources, he reactivates familiar motifs—figures, still lifes, fragments of bodies—by displacing and recombining them with banal or anachronistic elements, subtly unsettling their original meanings, while cultivating ambiguity in which fixed narratives dissolve into open pictorial fields where temporal and cultural references overlap.
In this exhibition titled Have You Ever Fallen in Love?, Baik explores the emotional turbulence of love through a group of paintings populated by unstable, theatrical figures. One work depicts a man smoking a cigarette in front of the Tree of Eden, under the gaze of Adam, Eve, and the serpent, while another male figure, partially camouflaged in the background, appears to whisper into his ear. Elsewhere, characters appear on their knees in gestures of supplication or desire, are entangled in shifting love triangles that suggest unstable dynamics of attraction and power, or ride white destriers evoking both romantic idealization and its inherent fragility.
Across the exhibition, the figure of the white swan recurs as a leitmotif, its Korean pronunciation baegjo (백조) echoing the artist’s own surname and introducing a subtle layer of linguistic and symbolic resonance. Oscillating between vulnerability, excess, and irony, the works stage love as a space of projection, imbalance, and emotional intensity. For the first time, the artist also presents a series of works on paper, extending these concerns into a more immediate and intimate register.
