Hyeejin Bae is a visual artist based in South Korea, London and Berlin. Her work deals with how our social behavior and interactions have been changed by our global digital communication networks and in particular commercial social media platforms.
It looks at our changing identities and the representation of ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in relation to four areas, namely the areas of self-identification, consumption, classification and intimacy. Her artistic practice draws on these areas to explore the psychological dynamics at work in each of them, focusing particularly on the attitudes that underlie our digital otherness and consumption of the Other. It assumes that most patterns of behaviour are driven by the individual’s fear of the other, a primal fear that remains as a residual drive for human action despite the assertions of the civilizing forces of history. She suggests that we manifest this fear by making the other the subordinate, instrumentalized object of our gratification and pleasure.
Her work is intended to serve as a counter-argument to the fragmenting forces in cyberspace by providing viewers with a shared experience on which to reflect and engage with the issues she raises. At a time when the world exists as a flat image and we communicate through indirect windows such as social media platforms, she believes that art as an intuitive experience can be an important means of communication to overcome a superficial world where social interaction risks being reduced to a mere means of self-expression.