Artist
Dina Jin Bae
Dina Jin Bae(디나진 ë°°)’s practice engages with shame, tenderness, and inherited memory through painting and material-based installation. Working with expired or discarded cosmetics—materials once used to care for and conceal the body—she transforms them into abstract, tactile surfaces that hold emotional and historical residue.
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Rooted in diasporic experience and shaped by Confucian values, her work attends to what remains unspoken. With a background in literary studies and the cosmetics industry, Bae is drawn to the poetics of surface—absorption, fragility, and transformation.
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Her practice is informed by unresolved familial histories connected to Japan during the colonial period, where intimacy and erasure coexist. Through abstraction, she creates spaces that linger, inviting a slowed encounter with traces that resist full articulation.
Artworks
This work uses false eyelashes mounted on a wooden panel, built up through repeated layers of pigment and wax. Removed from their original function of extending the eye, the lashes operate as material fragments, positioning painting as a form of skin or surface.
Produced largely in Vietnam for the Korean beauty market, false eyelashes circulate back through K-pop and popular media as intensified images of desire across Asia. The work reflects on this cycle of production and consumption, questioning how images of East Asian women are constructed, circulated, and sustained. By incorporating discarded cosmetic traces, the artist seeks to subtly reframe what is routinely overlooked, allowing residue and material excess to take on renewed presence.
Adrift in Motion, 2025
False eyelashes, oil, pigments, wax on wood panel, 30 x 40 x 2.6 cm
It is Not A Name in June, 2024
Oil, pigments, marble dust and sheet mask on linen, 180 x 270 cm
This painting is a study of the colour orange and an exploration of the makeup process as it is applied to the human face. Through layered applications of pigment, the work evokes the healthy flush of blood circulation and youth, the brilliance of sunlight, and the translucent, sun-kissed glow of yellow-orange tones—recalling the gesture of applying highlighter in makeup.
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The painting reflects on transformation as it appears in contemporary makeup practices, where surface becomes a site of subtle change and enhancement. At the same time, it references the classical ideal of beauty found in Flaming June by Frederic Leighton, drawing a quiet dialogue between historical painting and contemporary aesthetics of the face.