Sungho Bae: Apotropaia

August 2 – September 6, 2026

Reception for the Artist:

Sunday, August 2, 4:00 – 7:00 P.M.

Dansu, 2026, Stuffed animals salvaged from waste-disposal sites, leather waste, bird feathers, taxidermy glass eyes, decommissioned ritual objects, apotropaic materials, terracotta clay, epoxy clay, aged solid-wood baduk board.

Apotropaia begins with stuffed animals pulled from waste-disposal sites, figures that cuteness once made harmless, easy to love, easy to throw away. Sungho Bae takes them apart and rebuilds them over skeletal armatures, giving them provisional muscles, skin, and nerves.

Taxidermy glass eyes sit beside the animals' original eyes. Mortuary hemp cloth and other talismanic materials fill the gaps left by disassembly. Toy, body, and protective object stop being separate things.

None of this settles the figures; if anything, it deepens the instability. Each addition is a kind of repair,an attempt to hold together a form that's already standing in for something else. But the repair doesn't end the substitution, it extends it. What comes out the other side are new surrogates: objects thrown away once, salvaged, and rebuilt into watchful guardians, sentinels for the very world that discarded them.

This is the engine of Bae's broader practice: collecting, dismantling, recomposing. He borrows the visual language of anatomical models to treat the body not as fixed, but as something that can always be taken apart and reassembled. In his hands, fragments of different origins fuse into structures that refuse easy categories, where life and non-life, natural and artificial, stop being opposites and start looking like the same material.

Sungho Bae (b. 1988) received a BFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Based in Seoul and Chicago, selected exhibitions include Brandywine Museum of Art (2026), Chapter II (2025), Cylinder Gallery (2025), Roots & Culture (2025), Daejeon Museum of Art (2024), Casemore Gallery (2024), Wassaic Project (2024), 062 Gallery (2023), The Plan (2023), Hyde Park Art Center (2021, 2022), Buddy (2021), and Perennial Space (2020).