Painting the language of how memory lingers

Sarah Baek is a Korean-born painter based in the United States, working across painting and mixed media

Her work explores memory not as a fixed image, but as a lingering sensory condition shaped through color, atmosphere, and surface. Rather than describing specific narratives, she is interested in the unstable moments where memory begins to appear, dissolve, and transform.

Through layered acrylic painting and material experimentation, Baek builds surfaces that hold traces of pressure, transparency, density, and release. In her recent body of work, Intensity of Memory, memory is approached as a physical and emotional force embedded within the surface itself.

Nature often appears throughout her work, not as direct representation, but as a visual language through which sensation and perception emerge. Colors, textures, and fragmented forms become ways of tracing what remains before memory settles into a clear image.

Baek received her MFA from Hongik University in Seoul and her BFA from Hyosung Women’s University. Her work has been exhibited in Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, and has received awards through international juried exhibitions and competitions.