ABOUT
Baik Art presents J Sculpture Show, B. Koh’s first solo exhibition in Korea. Born in Korea and based in Los Angeles, Koh is a conceptual sculptor and installation artist whose work gently intervenes in ordinary objects and everyday phenomena, subtly shifting our perception of what we think we know. Bringing together early works from the 1990s and 2000s alongside recent pieces, this exhibition offers a broad view of the artist’s practice, marking his first substantial presentation in Korea since his large-scale installation at the 4th Gwangju Biennale.
Koh’s work begins with the easily overlooked—objects and moments that pass unnoticed in daily life. He turns his attention to what we routinely see and touch: clocks, strands of hair, cups, light, water, and minor traces. By stripping away the unnecessary and carefully manipulating elements such as scale, gravity, balance, and time, he introduces subtle disruptions into familiar orders. Critic David Pagel has described this approach as “gentle trickery,” a phrase that captures both the artist’s thoughtful engagement with material and his understated sense of humor. For Pagel and others, the moment when the familiar slips into something slightly strange can be understood as a form of “graceful ephemerality.” This paradoxical pairing resists reducing transience to loss, or melancholy; instead, it reveals a delicate beauty that emerges in fleeting shifts of perception.
J Sculpture Show traces this sensibility across works spanning several decades. The early pieces on view make these ideas immediately tangible. At the entrance, Thread Clock presents a familiar clock stripped of its hour and minute hands, leaving only a second hand from which a thread hangs. Its movement, subtly disrupted by the weight of the thread and the pull of gravity, unsettles the steady rhythm we associate with time. Upstairs, Wet Chair brings together light, water, electricity, and a plastic chair to create a situation that unfolds over time. A light bulb hangs down to meet a shallow pool of water collected on the chair’s surface, where evaporation produces continuous, almost imperceptible change. Similarly, Water Wood stages a precarious balance shaped by the slow disappearance of water, holding tension and transformation in quiet suspension.
The exhibition also introduces new works developed during the artist’s recent stay in Seoul, shaped by objects encountered in his immediate surroundings. In Drip, a small puncture in a plastic water bottle allows droplets to fall one by one, briefly forming a shape that recalls a diver suspended midair.
Koh’s work engages states before meaning settles: sensations just prior to articulation or moments of intuition that arrive before logic. Viewers encounter suspended time, shifting balance, and conditions poised between disappearance and persistence. Rather than transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary, Koh’s sculptures and installations return us to what we have already seen but perhaps failed to notice. Through minute differences and nearly imperceptible movements, he reveals latent sensations embedded in everyday objects and situations. These sensations linger, quietly reorienting our perception long after encounter.
