Soeun Bae (b.2000) is from South Korea, raised in Alabama, and now based in New York. Bae completed her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. She recently had a solo show at Wave Hill, New York. Bae was an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado; NARS Foundation, New York; and Velvetpark, New York in 2024. Her work has been shown in the A.I.R. Gallery, New York; AHL Foundation, New York; Stove Works, Tennessee; NARS Foundation, New York; Space One Eleven, Alabama; and more. In 2023, Bae received the T&W Contemporary Visual Art Award from the AHL Foundation.
I work with sculpture, technology, and performance to question what it is to be living inside of a body. My work delves into politics of care, sexuality, maternity, production, and vulnerability. I make pleasurable objects that present a depersonalized and desensitized way of relating to our bodies. In need of regeneration and transformation in a world of consumption and utilization. I point towards vulnerable bodies through reimaginations that reflect experiences of isolation and dysfunction in a personal and socio-political body. I explore the dissection, mechanization, and objectification to birth a hybrid body that holds potential for optimization as it becomes altered, tested, and used.
My practice comes from when I feel the most alive. I feel the most alive in my body through desire, pain, and systems of care. I treat my objects as embryos, or incubators, that have a particular dependency in the relationship that I create through them. Somewhere between obsession, attachment, isolation, and recuperation.
The mechanic body of the sculptures lives on its own, becoming autonomous in the mechanized movement. The objects’ plastic flesh needs human assistance for survival; I provide care for the supposedly living machines. These objects operate within pseudo-systems for performative gestures. My work becomes a starting point for a series of movements that reconfigures a body outside of itself within a network of exchange between fluids, vitalities, and functions.
My objects have a desire to be self-regulating, self-performing, and autonomous. Objects that transform, that can’t stay still. They want to be touched, drained, injected, to live, to resist, to take control of their own self. Through my work, I seek sensation overload.