Exhibition Information

Exhibition view

			The world is black. Only its outlines remain—black, and black again. Wherever one looks, there is nothing but darkness, and one can no longer tell where to place one’s feet. The nose and ears are of no use; there is no scent, no sound. Such is blackness. Yet above this darkened world, where all sensation has fallen silent, the sky is astonishingly majestic. It is white, yet yellow, red, and at once green. It seems to emit a radiant light, as though wishing to purify the blackened earth below.In the face of this striking opposition between profound darkness and dazzling brilliance, one senses a kind of inverted parallax.
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Darkness deepens the light, and light thickens the dark. Gyeong-jak BAHK understands painting within such a world of contrasts—as a medium of truth. For him, painting is a passage that reveals the essential order beyond the imperfection of the senses. This passage always lies between light and darkness. Their opposition is not merely chromatic, but akin to the clash and entanglement between the finite and the infinite. It is neither a scene of apocalypse nor a promise of salvation. The dark earth and the luminous sky coexist in tension, neither consuming the other. Naturally, the works call for silence rather than logic, for resonance rather than explanation. The viewer moves from the position of a mere observer to that of a respondent, passing between light and darkness within their own time and experience. In BAHK’s paintings, truth does not speak as a singular revelation but emerges as an individual experience—appearing, as it were, through a temporal and perceptual shift. It is a paradoxical journey towards the reality of being, traced through the very phenomenon of parallax.
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Perhaps it can never be reached. Every light burns itself out, sinking into darkness; every darkness, within itself, stirs into the faintness of light. On that fragile threshold, the world stands still, and being turns momentarily transparent. His painting contemplates and reflects on that instant of transformation. Near, yet distant.