k-art in london
Go where Joonhyung Bae’s figures fade and emotions linger.
Having spent a decade in the United States and recently acquiring citizenship there, Joonhyung Bae decided to step into a new chapter in the United Kingdom, seeking to challenge himself and nourish his painting practice on new and fertile soil.
For much of his early career, Joonhyung focused on formless abstraction, allowing emotion to diffuse through colour and gestural marks. In the year prior to his move, however, traces of figuration started to surface. Being accepted to the Royal College of Art (RCA) amplified this shift, situating his practice at a threshold where abstraction and figuration coexist, overlap, and continually transform one another. This liminal space, where figures emerge only to dissolve once more, mirrors Joonhyung’s enduring fascination with themes of temporality, memory, and becoming.
At the RCA, Joonhyung was encouraged to transcend instinct alone, embracing theory in order to deepen his practice. Under the guidance of Dr. Kamini Vellodi, he started to approach painting as a matter of philosophical and anthropological inquiry. His tutor, Phil Allen, also noted Francis Bacon-esque corporeal forms in Joonhyung’s canvases, suggesting that he articulate points of difference and push further into the material, conceptual, and emotional facets of his own visual language.
Joonhyung’s process often emerges with a smear or a gesture, the likes of which gradually implies form. He works with thin oil paint, avoiding heavy impasto so that colour retains a certain delicacy even in its boldest state. This creates a tension between fragility and intensity, echoing a personal interest in archaic surfaces such as cave drawings, fossils, and cracked leaves that capture the essence of time within them. Like worn textures, his brushwork records presence and absence at once, becoming a kind of contemporary archaeology and an excavation of personal and collective memory entwined.
Since arriving in London, two milestones stand out. Presenting at the RCA Degree Show opened conversations with curators and peers about where Joonhyung’s work sits in the contemporary field. Soon after, his acceptance into the Ferens Open at Ferens Art Gallery in Kingston upon Hull (October 2025 – January 2026) reinforced a desire to remain in the United Kingdom and build momentum beyond the academy.
Joonhyung’s triptych Transference (2025) best encapsulates his London days. Painted in counter-chronological order, the right panel was his first London canvas, an urgent embrace of figuration after years of abstraction. The centre, chosen for the Ferens Open, acts as a connective passage with two amalgamated figures at its core. The left, painted most recently, opens into a lighter and more pared-back space, reflecting a negotiation between enforced clarity and simplicity, and the forces of uncertainty, openness, and possibility he so prefers. Indeed, for Joonhyung, painting comes alive while lingering in the in-between, where subjects blur and fade, where past and present collide, and where emotion is never explained, but felt within.
