Bae, Bien-U: Windscape - Hardcover

We can hear the wind, taste it, feel it. And as my golden retrievers, Moxie and Harry, remind me on any blowy day as they periscope their snouts into the air, we can also smell it. But here the South Korean photographer Bae, Bien-U lets us see the wind, using landscape to give gusts and breezes shape. This elemental book and its 500 shades of gray are all ocean and stone, fog and long grasses, revealing an unsettled weather of the soul. I almost expected Moxie and Harry to trot over and give the book a sniff.--Dana Jennings "The New York Times "

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. Exhibition schedule: Aando Fine Art, Berlin, November 9, 2012–January 1, 2013 | Paris Photo November 15–18, 2012 | Galerie RX, Paris November 24, 2012–January 26, 2013 | Christophe Guye Galerie, Zürich November 29, 2012–March 2, 2013