Jihye Baek

Jihye Sage Baek works between photography and drawing, using ordinary objects as emotional and symbolic forms. Flowers, eggs, chains, and fabric recur throughout her practice—not as still-life subjects, but as carriers of memory, tension, intimacy, and transformation. Her work explores identity, female psychology, motherhood, and interpersonal relationships through images that feel both delicate and unsettling. Drawn to what she calls ugly beautiful, Baek creates quiet visual riddles where tenderness and discomfort, beauty and unease, can exist at once.

Works

$31.5K

Catalog

Profile

About the Artist

Artist Statement

The Morph is a photographic series that examines the unstable shape of the self as it emerges and disappears through motion. Using balloons as temporary forms, I capture moments that blur, twist, and dissolve before they can fully settle into a fixed image. As a woman, a mother, and a participant in social life, I see identity as something continuously shaped and reshaped through care, expectation, repetition, and tension. Through traces of movement, afterimages, and incomplete contours, the work reflects emotional and psychological states rather than fixed definitions of self.

Career

Exhibitions

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2025 — Fragments of Identity, Kosaka, New York 2023 — The Morph, Gallery Dam, Seoul 2023 — My Perfume, Bona Gallery, Daegu 2023 — Marking Time, Gala Art Center, New York 2020 — The Morph, Gagosipo Gallery, Seoul 2016 — In Between, Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery, New York Selected Group Exhibitions 2025 — Art for Hope, AP Gallery, New York 2024 — Confessions II, Belskie Museum, New Jersey 2024 — What, Daegu Art Museum, South Korea 2023 — Focus Art Fair, New York 2023 — Affordable Art Fair, New York 2022 — AHL Art Fair, New York 2022 — Color, CICA Museum, South Korea 2019 — All About Love, Union Art Fair, Seoul 2018 — Between Woman and Human, Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey 2016 — She, Sweet Art, London Selected Publications 2016 — Fresh Painting Magazine, Issue 14 2016 — Honorable Mention, Photographer’s Forum 2015 — Still, NoART – Lower Austria Society for Arts Professional Experience 2023–Present — Art Director, Gala Art Center, Queens, New York