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Configuring Wrap

The painted shards are “wrapped” as in the practice of common women of the Josun Dynasty who gathered up bits and pieces of existing cloths to create patchworks (bo-ja-gi) large enough to wrap gifts or to cover individual lacquer dinner tables. — SoHyun Bae

SoHyun Bae's Wrapped Shards canvas is space, visible and not quite visible - access to something unknown, yet pushing into the known before our eyes. What kind of space — inner, outer; historical, cosmological? A window or an unnamable opening? An other dimension or a rediscovered realm? Specifying it is risky. Yet standing before such intensely wrought image activity—soft gradations of migrating blues, grays and related pigments, the textured surfaces of saturated rice paper (shades of white slip on early Korean pottery), the viewer feels the pull and tries to get oriented.

What is the scale of events? There are certain pointers. The size of the canvas, usually five to nearly seven feet square, roughly matches the viewer, and yet the visual “action” suggests something much greater. The image sometimes seems recognizable, as in Wrapped Shards: Egg Woman II (2003) — abstracted woman with basket of eggs on her head— thus a human scale and window-on-reality view. Yet the shifting image (doubling? dividing? shaking? reuniting?) is contained in an oval background shape like a huge hidden head, pushing scale to the “colossal” (cf. Bae's earlier series, A Woman of Josun Dynasty: Colossal Head I-VII, 1998, not on view).
A centered head as interior container, even its vestige, implies a vessel of the quasi-archetypal female, in part ancestral presence, wherein a trace of the divine feminine (the Shekhinah of Kabbalah) shows through, as if emerging from the ground of layered color. Behind the “image