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Bahc Yiso
Bahc Yiso, Your Bright Future, 2002, Electric lamps, woods and wires, MMCA collection

Bahc Yiso

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Bahc Yiso (Bahc Mo, 1957-2004) was a conceptual artist who played a crucial role in leading postmodernist discourse in Korean art in the 1990s. After studying Western painting in the College of Fine arts at Hongik University, Bahc enrolled in the Painting Department of the Pratt Institute Graduate School in the U.S. in 1982 and graduated from there in 1985. He used the name “Bahc Mo” in the U.S., and as a theorist, critic, and translator, he introduced contemporaneous art theories to the Korean art community. From 1985 through 1989, he ran Minor Injury, an alternative space in Brooklyn defying the mainstream art world and organized group exhibitions to promote Korean art abroad, including Minjung Art: New Cultural Movement of Korea (1988) and Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art (1993–1994). He returned to South Korea in 1995 and began using the name “Bahc Yiso” since 1998. He also strove to introduce alternative models of art education as an educator. In 2002, he became the winner of the third Hermés Foundation Missulsang, and in 2003 he participated in the 50th Venice Biennale as the representative artist of the Korean Pavilion. In 2004, he died suddenly of a heart attack. His major works include Exotic, Minority, Oriental (1990), UN Tower (1997), and We Are Happy (2004). Bahc received the Arts Council Korea’s Art of the Year Award in 2006. In the same year, an exhibition entitled Divine Comedy: A Retrospective of Bahc Yiso was held. Another exhibition Bahc Yiso: Lines of Flight was held in 2011. Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories, a large-scale retrospective exhibition held in 2018 at the MMCA brought him to public attention.
* Source: MMCA

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