Kijoo Bae

Biography

Kijoo Bae is a Korean fine art photographer based in Seoul. 

His work explores abstraction through architecture, focusing on line, colour, light, reflection, and structure. Through close observation and visual transformation, he turns familiar architectural elements into new abstract forms. 

His work has been exhibited in Korea, the United States, and Europe, and recognized through international photography awards and exhibitions. 

Artist Statement

Abstraction in Architecture

Abstraction in Architecture explores how photography can reveal and create abstraction within the built environment.

I do not approach architecture primarily as a subject to be documented. Instead, I focus on fragments—surfaces, edges, reflections, colour, light, and structural relationships—that can free the image from the recognizable identity of a building.

Through framing, familiar architecture begins to dissolve. A façade may become a geometric composition, a reflection may merge different spaces, and colour may separate itself from the object to become an independent visual presence.

These images do not exist in a fixed form within architecture. They emerge at a particular moment through the relationship between the building, light, time, position, reflection, and perception.

For me, photography exists between discovery and creation. I respond to what is already present, while framing transforms that encounter into a new visual reality.

The resulting photographs move between architecture and abstraction, recognition and uncertainty, reality and perception—without fully belonging to any single category.