The recording of meetings with the unfamiliar (curator Chaewon Yun)

There are times when we cannot remember what we dreamed of when we are awakened from a deep sleep. The only thing we can remember is the fact that we had a dream while asleep. For those whose job is to create and come up with something new regardless of their fields, forgetting dreams can be upsetting and sometimes even infuriating. To deal with this problem, the artist decided to keep a separate ‘diary for dreams’. The writing and drawing done hastily in the dark upon waking up from a dream are quite rough, but can serve as basic assets and as a useful guide for the artist’s work.
To Hyohoon Baek, dreams are worth more than inspiration for works. The artist’s dreams made in her subconscious state of mind cannot be judged by things like logic, common sense, and ethics. What matters is what the artist can discover in her dreams and what she can create with such discoveries. The artist created arbitrary spaces pausing rational thinking and posed questions hidden underneath them to herself. And such things take the form of various living things and spaces and emerge in front of the artist. As dreams are something made in one’s mind, they are usually reflective of one’s thought or experiences about reality. However, on occasion, one’s dreams display some people around him or her or some places he or she has never imagined before. Although different people have different dreams, all dreams are the reflection of each individual’s inner side. In dreams, the artist made a lot of discoveries, and the artist herself was included among them. In one dream, the artist received a look from ‘someone’ who looked just like her when she was about twenty years old and she stared back at that person. Later on, she painted that experience. To be able to paint her dreams, recording her dreams is an essential process for her. The attempt to grasp at her dream that disappears in an instant upon waking up from her sleep is like a futile effort to grasp at the air, but the artist never stops ruminating on her dreams until she thinks her re-creation of her dreams is completed. This process is incorporated in her actual working process. The mulberry paper with rough surface texture and outlines is divergent from vertically and horizontally accurate frameworks. Therefore, the mulberry paper itself shows coincidences that are the concept of dreams. At the same time, the mulberry paper symbolizes empty, white spaces that become backdrops when the artist’s dreams are going along. That is to say, the process of making the mulberry paper where wet pulp soaked in water is getting picked up and drained with a sieve is in line with the artist’s main work to remember and to express her dreams. The absorbent properties and repellency of the mulberry paper made that way create accidental effects when paints spread on the paper, which is the expressive trait well suited to dreams that are the illogical subject matter. The artist paints the surface of paper using various materials such as paints, graphite, ink sticks, and acrylic paints and observes the outcomes letting the colors and shapes follow her dreams in a way that she can remember her dreams. When paintings are completed with her endlessly repeated efforts, people can feel as if the artist is inside her paintings and look out from there. The ambivalent characteristics of dreams in the sense that dreams are not unrelated to one’s reality but they are naturally unrealistic give the artist the freedom to be able to ignore boundaries and offer her the opportunity to expand her world of art works. In dreams where the law of time and space does not apply, the artist, as the observer and as the object of observation, uses herself as a tool for her dream work. Viewing her paintings where her own world where the meetings with herself which is her own self and at the same time another person that look like something impossible can be made possible is re-created, I hope that the meetings the artist has experienced will be able to give other people the opportunity to have the same mysterious experiences.