Jongwon Bae

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

I start my painting by automatic drawing, applying paint with brushes and other tools to create a grisaille. At a certain point, some unbidden forms keep emerging from the surface. It seems my brain projects them to the surface from the unconscious. Relying on the concept of Freudian Uncanny and other psychological theories, my works seem to reflect the repressed memories of my childhood, especially incubated by the indoctrination of techno-utopian dreams and their subsequent waning influence of optimism, as a form of denatured nostalgia. Although I wish I could erase the period from my mind filled with mixed feelings of being awkward, anxious, manipulated, and disappointed yet occasional bittersweet flash memories, I have realized I am incapable of denying its existence or escaping from it because it already has become an inseparable part of my identity. Likewise, while I did not want to deal with it again through my paintings, I cannot reject its return to my paintings from the unconscious. My current paintings, with the forms of denatured nostalgia, embody some ideas and suggest them through several themes such as the themes of circus, the establishment of an implicit viewer’s space, reverse writing, and others. As my paintings become confluent with the anxieties about the current and the future, the ontological problem and the ambivalence toward the technology, it is to be a twilight zone where incongruent and even antithetical elements vacillate between the past and...

Artwork