In Residue (2026), hanji lies in torn and crumpled pieces under a skin of wax. Where the paper lies flat it is almost white. Where it creased or doubled back it turns a deep brown. The stain is darkest where the paper folded over itself. The colour is soy sauce, and it has travelled some distance to stop here.
It begins in a tank. In Fold (2025), Baek stands barefoot and dressed in white in a room whose floor and one wall are covered with hanji. In the middle is a low tank with clear sides, filled with soy sauce. At first he only touches it, letting drops fall from his fingertips onto the paper. Then he lowers his head into it, folds his body over the rim, and climbs in. For a while he lies in the sauce, and the sauce holds him.
When he climbs out, the order reverses. Now he holds the sauce. His white clothes have turned its colour; it runs down his legs and drips from his hair. Everything that follows is the sauce leaving him. He walks, and it leaves through his feet. He kneels and curls on the floor with his head in his hands, and the paper beneath him takes it in as it crumples. He leans his forehead against the papered wall, then his whole body, and leaves standing shapes there as tall as a man. Not all of it came this way. Some of the sauce reached the paper straight from his fingertips; some came the long way, from the tank through cloth and skin, carried by a body that had become its means.
The title names the gesture that carries it. He bows, bends, curls, presses. Each time the body folds, the paper folds under it, and the sauce gathers in the fold. It is in the creases that the panels are darkest. The darkest colour is where the weight was.
On the screen, all of this is in motion. The stain spreads as the body moves, and then the film ends. Off the screen, the paper was torn from the floor and the wall, cut, and laid down again, and wax closed over it. What was moving is now held. There is no figure in the panels. The paper does not show where he was; it shows where it was pressed and folded while he was there. Nor can it say which brown fell from his hand and which passed through him first. The panel keeps the result and lets the route go.
Seen side by side, the film and the panels describe the same sauce twice: once as it moves, once as it stays. Between the two lies the meantime.
Dohyun Baek's Residue (2026) will be shown in (mean)while, KVAA's first exhibition, at St Marylebone Art Space, London, from 26 November 2026 to 25 January 2027.
— KOUM Partners, London