Museum Hanmi is pleased to present Being a Mountain, a solo exhibition by BAK Hyongryol, from October 25, 2024 to January 19, 2025 at Samcheong Annex, Museum Hanmi.

BAK is a visual artist who explores the relationship between nature and humans through the medium of photography. His photographs are similar in appearance to the posthumous recordings of land art and performance that were at the forefront of avant-garde art in the 1960s, but ultimately align with the practice of conceptual artists who began to understand photography as an idiosyncratic visual language. In Being a Mountain, BAK experiments with various media and perspectives in order to break away from an anthropocentric perspective and face nature properly. The artist's consistent thematic consciousness, which is concerned with the ongoing relationship between humans and nature, is also revealed in this exhibition.

Being a Mountain presents two of BAK's series, A Cross Section of a Mountain and Being a Mountain. Both works stem from BAK's interest in land reclamation projects in southwestern Gyeonggi Province. A Cross Section of a Mountain selects some of the shapes of over 100 mountain cross-sections collected from satellite images and the newly reclaimed land, carving their shapes into the actual reclaimed land and revealing them as photographic images. In this series, the height of the mountains, which is not revealed through the negative perspective consistently used in the work, is restored by reconstructing 20 MDF boards. Meanwhile, Being a Mountain is a work in which the artist actually entered and photographed a cut-out mountain. Through his new work, the artist realized that the mountain's layers, which appeared to be contour lines in the satellite images, were actually planned layers to efficiently excavate the mountain. The two series, which originated from an interest in the lowering mountains and expanding land, showcase one aspect of the artist's multifaceted experiments with various media, accompanied by a multi-layered perspective.