Dina Jin Bae

Born in 1988 in Suncheon, South Korea.

Currently works in London, United Kingdom and South Korea.

EDUCATION / TRAINING

2024 Royal College of Art, Painting MA, London, UK

2022 Assistant teacher's 1st course, Ikebana Ohara-ryū, Seoul, KR

2012 Yonsei University, French language and literature, BA, Seoul, KR

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS / PROJECTS

2025 The Summer Days, Silian Gallery, London, UK2025 Songs of Innocence and Experience, Galleria Brescia, Brescia, IT2024 K-Women, Kingston Museum, London, UK2024 NOW 2024, Gerald Moore Gallery, London, UK2024 Tex-ture 2024, CICA Museum, Gimpo, KR2024 The Entranced Essence, RuptureXIBIT(+studio), London, UK

2024 Things That Matter, AMP gallery, London, UK

PUBLIC PROGRAMS & RECOGNITIONS

2024 Artist Talk and Tutorials at Univerisity for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK

2023 Shortlisted for Sarabande Foundation Scholarship, London, UK

PRESS

2025 “Candido e carnale: la natura del colore in una mostra a Brescia,” Inside Art, Italy, April 2025

2025 “Watch: Kingston Museum Celebrates Korean Female Artists”, Kingston Courier, UK, April 2025

PUBLICATION

2025 Featured artist - 'Soft Witness: 50 Artists, 50 Stories' by Neal Yang

2024 Featured artist - 'Artists And Their Tools' by Sarah Larby (V&A Collection)

Photography by Sarah Larby, from Artists & Their Tools (V&A collection)

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.

Artist Statement by Dina Jin Bae, July 2025.

"For me, makeup brushes and sponges feel like an extension of the body.

They start as artificial, mass-produced objects, but through use, these tools interact with sensitive parts of the body. So they're highly effective at delivering smooth, even pigment.

Over time, as my makeup brushes wear down, I recycle them into my art practice, giving them new life beyond their intended function."

Photography by Sarah Larby, from Artists & Their Tools (V&A collection)

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