Egg Woman II

SoHyun Bae splashed and dripped pigments on overlapping layers of Korean rice paper to create this image of a Korean woman wearing her country's traditional dress (hanbok) and carrying a basket of eggs on her head. Bae, who studied religious philosophies while a graduate student in theology at Harvard University, says that the series was inspired in part by themes from Jewish mysticism, and that it also derives from her personal experience as a child in Korea. Bae remembers the frail and tiny "egg woman" coming to her home with an enormous basket of eggs balanced on her head. To her, the egg woman seemed to symbolize the plight of women on their walks through life.

Egg Woman II is part of Bae's Wrapped Shards series. Her works often draw on the theme of women and Korean handicrafts. Here, she portrays the multiple images of the woman's head and body as if they are broken into shards, but the careful arrangement of the Korean rice paper poetically wraps the shards. The idea of wrapping refers to the patchwork (bojagi) craft tradition, an integral part of daily life of Korean women throughout the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910).

SoHyun Bae received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Boston University. In 2007 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fine arts and participated in the exhibition Contemporary Korean Artists in New York, the first in the Korean Artists in the World series of exhibitions, organized by the Seoul Arts Center in Korea.