About.

Jaemin Bae (b. 1992, Daegu, South Korea) is a painter whose work bridges the discipline of Buddhist art with the openness of contemporary painting. His practice turns to the figure—secular and deified—rendered in forms that appear blurred, geometric, or out of focus. Though they may seem abstract, these images remain anchored in figuration, giving visible shape to spiritual and emotional states. Underlying this trajectory is Bae’s sense of painting as a journey of discipline, trial, and illumination.
Bae’s first steps were pragmatic: he trained in Buddhist painting with the aim of becoming an art restorer. This education, rooted in strict fidelity to historical models, gave him a disciplined foundation in pigments, brushwork, and iconography. Yet it also revealed the limits of replication. From his Haebang-chon (“Liberation Town”) studio, he began to look beyond conservation, depicting not only Buddhist figures but also secular presences, his gaze shifting inward and outward rather than solely upward.
In 2018, a fire destroyed his studio and left him gravely injured, a rupture that forced him to confront his own mortality. During this long convalescence, painting and Buddhism remained central, but faith expanded beyond codified devotion into a broader, more searching spirituality. His figures reflected this shift: less defined, blurred and unstable, recognizable yet dissolving. No longer exclusively serene or “Buddha-like,” they began to embody other dispositions—stern, wrathful, alien, adrift in storm. If earlier works recalled the completeness of the classical Buddha in Journey to the West, his later paintings echoed the tale’s imperfect but striving protagonists—always moving, westward and back again, toward betterment and illumination.
In his most recent works, geometric structures—triangles, circles, and fields of color—create order and balance, yet within them forms flicker between presence and absence. Figures, symbols, and atmospheres overlap, producing images that feel both anchored and impermanent.
Today, Bae lives and works in Daegu, South Korea.

Text by Jinwon Park