Press Release: Yiso Bahc

08.15.00

Yiso Bahc was born in 1957 in Busan, Korea, and lives and works in Seoul. He holds
a B.F.A. in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul, and an M.F.A. from Pratt
Institute, New York. Previously known as MoBahc, he has exhibited his work throughout
Asia and the Americas, including solo shows at the Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul (1995)
and the Bronx Museum, New York (1990). His work was included in the 1998 Taipei
Biennial, the 1997 Kwang-ju Biennial and the 1994 Havana Biennial. His work was also
included in the exhibition Defrost, at the Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998. In
2001 he will participate in the Yokohama Triennial.

Through architectural installation and sculpture, Korean Yiso Bahc is interested in
quietly disturbing our perceptions and judgements. With subtle imagery and spatial
manipulation, his work questions the complexities of culture and nature, public and
private, virtual and real.

Yiso Bahc was selected for ArtPace's International Artist-in-Residence Program by
Sun Jung Kim, Chief Curator of the ArtSonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul,
Korea. Bahc is in residence with New York-based Yangah Ham and San Antonio-based
Dario Robleto.

Yiso Bahc's project at ArtPace continues the artist's interest in space and dislocation.
In the gallery, Bahc removed a large portion of the newly built wall and placed it on the
floor, leaving its rough details?den beams and drywall?act. Bahc then projects
live video images from cameras installed on ArtPace's roof onto the floor-bound wall or
"screen." Multiple projectors create an inverted collage of San Antonio's horizon and the
seemingly endless Texas sky. Bahc deftly shifts perspective so viewers seem to look out
as they actually peer down and remain inside.

A second piece presents a more imaginary landscape. Updating the icon of a message
in a bottle, the artist has launched into the Gulf of Mexico a bottle containing a Global
Positioning System (GPS) tracking device. The GPS, sealed within a modest, plastic
bottle, transmits a signal of its precise location as it floats in the sea. Bahc charts a route
of an unpredictable, aimless journey by marking the gallery's wall. The viewer imagines
an experience "at sea" and without bearings. The piece is both finite and endless: when
the battery in the device dies, the bottle will disappear from our mapping knowledge, but
not from the earth. With the drifting bottle, Bahc seems to question the limits of our
knowledge about existence, future, and fate.

In both pieces, real-time and surveillance are placed in the context of nature, creating
a poetic meditation. With the projected sky, the viewer searches, waits for action to
appear; conversely, with the bottle floating in the sea, the sculpture is the action, although
it is powerless in its direction, dependent on the current to chart its course. Quiet and
open-ended, Bahc's work reflects on ideas of passage? flow of time and crossings of
boundaries.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org