Windscape

Bae, Bien-U (*1950 in Yosu, South Korea) gained recognition for his meditative landscape photographs, which possess an almost calligraphic quality. His new series, created over the course of the past twenty years, features landscapes in motion. Trees and grass lean in the wind; steep crags, cliffs, and rocks and stones shaped by water lie enveloped in sea spray and fog in the surf; the lines of the horizon disappear in the white-gray of the sky. As is also the case in Chinese and Japanese, the Korean word commonly used to denote landscape is a compound of the words “wind” and “scenery.” It is closely bound to the traditional cosmological notion of a quintessence that permeates all living things: the ether. The poetic neologism, “windscape,” is a literal translation of this term, which is associated with the same levels of meaning throughout East Asia.