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DINA JIN BAE
My practice explores shame, tenderness, and inherited memory through painting, material experimentation, and installation. I work with expired or discarded cosmetics such as sheet masks, sponge applicators, and foundation puffs—materials once used to care for and conceal the body. These are folded into my process as both subject and medium, forming tactile compositions that hold emotional residue and resist fixed meaning.
Rooted in my experience of growing up between cultures and shaped by Confucian values and the quiet tensions of diasporic life, my work attends to what remains unspoken. With a background in literary studies and years spent developing cosmetics, I am attuned to the poetics of surface—colour, absorption, fragility, and transformation.
Inherited memory and unresolved histories surface through sensation. My grandfather lived in Japan during the colonial era, a period almost absent from family memory. I have long been drawn to crafts, ikebana, and pre-war aesthetics with a mix of fascination and guilt. These tensions between intimacy and erasure, inheritance and refusal, inform the spaces I try to create in my work.
Through abstraction, I look for ways to hold what is often ungraspable. A trace, a feeling, a gesture. I want the work to pause, to stay with what lingers just below recognition. In a world of speed and surface, I make paintings that wait.
