Tending the Garden, Tilling the Ground —
Reading Baik Soon Shil's 40 Years of Painting through the Language of Gardening


Artist ㅣ Baik Soon Shil

Tilling the soil, planting seeds, tending what grows, and covering what must rest. Gardening is a slow, repetitive act whose outcome can never be fully predicted. And what of the act of painting? Blume Museum of Contemporary Art presents Gardening & Painting, a solo exhibition by Baik Soon Shil, who has developed a distinctive language of Korean abstract painting over the past four decades. The exhibition seeks to discover a shared sense of temporal sensibilities and embodied gestures between two seemingly unrelated acts — painting and gardening — and through that connection, to offer a new way of reading Baik's work. The exhibition runs from May 1 to October 31, and presents 35 works spanning from the late 1980s to recent years.

For over 40 years, Baik Soon Shil has sustained her Dongdasong series, inspired by the writings of the Buddhist monk Choui, who articulated the spirit of Korean tea culture. Her practice begins with the everyday act of drinking tea and extends into a painterly translation of its philosophy. Using materials such as ink, volcanic stone, gouache and matte medium, she repeatedly layers, dries, and builds surfaces—creating dense, textured grounds that embody the vitality of the earth. For Baik, Dongdasong is not merely about tea; it is a record of painterly contemplation on time, restraint, and the ground itself.
Just as tea leaves steep into water and pigments seep into paper, materials pass through time to become image. This process closely parallels how a gardener works with soil and seasons. The exhibition adopts this resemblance as a conceptual framework, reinterpreting Baik’s paintings through the language of gardening.

The exhibition is structured around four verbs of garden work: till, tend, wait, and cover.
In the opening section Till — works from the late 1980s, made with fine brushstrokes repeatedly drawn across Korean paper, and paintings from the 2000s built up through layers of accumulated material, are arranged like furrows rising from the ground. Visitors walk between them as if moving through a field.
In Tend — featuring works from the mid-to-late 1990s, this section highlights the increasing presence of form and color. Like a gardener’s touch shaping plants, the artist’s intention becomes more visible on the pictorial surface.
In Wait — works painted horizontally, in which ink and medium are left to flow and settle of their own accord. Like a gardener who steps back and trusts the soil, the sun, and the wind, the artist waits for the material to find its own way.
In Cover — Quiet Time Series is placed in the final room, where the garden the artist has actually tended comes into view through the glass wall. The exhibition concludes in the space where a winter gardener quietly observes nature while contemplating the next season—with paintings that are less about drawing and more about the act of finding, where the artist gazes longingly at the already cultivated ground to discover and bring forth emerging forms.

Gardening & Painting is not an exhibition for appreciating finished images. It is a space where we can reflect on the time in which paintings are made, the process by which materials and actions become a surface, and the relationship an artist has sustained with nature over a lifetime. If we find ourselves linger so long before Baik Soon Shil's cultivated paintings, it may be because her canvases feel not like completed images, but like living places where something is still happening.