The Korean artist Sungho Bae builds his work from discarded items, transforming stuffed toys, anatomical models, and fragments of cloth into odd new forms that exist between a toy and a specimen. He gathers, disassembles, and puts back together cast-off objects, and his present exhibition, “20 Vibrant Artworks By Sungho Bae Filled With Wild Textures And Unexpected Details,” demonstrates how far he can take that method.
The stuffed animals in Bae’s work are meant to serve as stand-ins for comfort — surrogates for the body itself. Put them side by side with an anatomical model and a heap of cast-off fabric, though, and the parallels become plain. All three are mass-produced objects designed to function as surrogates for the human form. Once that connection is made, Bae’s project turns toward the fragility of how we perceive our own bodies, examining what occurs when those fixed identities begin to shift.
What Bae Collects And Dismantles
Bae’s method changes with the material. He accumulates, contains, substitutes, and infers from anatomy, building his work through layer after layer of collected fragments. The resulting forms don’t keep their sources whole. They drift among commercial object, fragment, specimen, image, and fictional body, and it’s often hard to say which one you’is what they are being looked at as.
He builds his taxonomies through gathering and taking apart, driven by distinctions in how things were put together, how they have been worn down, how they have been used, and how they have been moved around. Soft toys, cast-off cloth, bodily models, and pieces taken from various material systems each set their own terms for being put back together, so the approach shifts depending on what is being worked with, moving through piling up, holding within bounds, replacing parts, tracing body shapes, or arranging images side by side.
The Big Works In The Exhibition
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Anatomy Of Unnamed, Yet Loved, a massive installation from 2025. It measures 230 × 90 × 90 cm and combines Frankenstein monster plush toy parts, plush toy product tags, pins marking plush toy sources, and an engraved metal base with relief. The piece is a full-scale anatomical model built from discarded toys, and it’s the clearest example of Bae’s method in action.
The work Homo Derelictus Retextus: Case Study Of Speculative Reconstruction No. 2 is a large-scale piece measuring 142 × 100 × 42 cm. It is constructed from recovered stuffed animal components and skull reproductions, assembled using anatomical deduction after being reclaimed from the waste stream. The title points toward a speculative method of reconstruction, and the visual presentation backs up that approach.
Smaller Pieces That Pack A Punch
Not everything in the exhibition is life-size. Codex: Archiving The New Mythos is a small, ongoing project from 2022–2024. It measures 22.9 × 15.2 × 2.5 cm and includes fabrics from Frankenstein monster plush toys, product tags, and one extracted eye. The piece is a kind of archive, preserving the materials of Bae’s larger work in a compact format.
Another small piece, measuring 24.6 × 19.6 × 19.6 cm, is PA-11335. Its materials include stuffed animal parts and skull replicas recovered from waste-disposal sites, along with reconstructed skull replicas and archival pigment prints mounted on an aluminum panel. The title itself functions as a serial number, and the work comes across as a fragmentary record of something lost.
Photography And Mixed Media
Bae’s practice makes extensive use of photography, and two works in particular illustrate how she moves between physical objects and flat images while blurring the line between them. The first is Reconstructed Head No. 3, an archival pigment print Diasec-mounted with dimensions 102 × 87 cm. The second is Nexus Field, a collage that brings together cut photographs, discarded plush toy fragments, acrylic paint, and an archival pigment print mounted on an aluminum panel, measuring 190 × 310 cm.
The work Tamed Wounds comes from a stitched series spanning 2022–ongoing. It brings together wounded designs on soft stuffed monsters, coin holders, and a chromogenic print, sized at 72.4 × 96.5 cm. While the name points toward command, the materials remain rough and broken.
The Largest Works
Both Homo Derelictus Retextus: Composite Anatomical Montage No. 1-A and Homo Derelictus Retextus: Composite Anatomical Montage No. 2-E were made in 2024, and they share identical dimensions: a photographic composite of layered stuffed animal parts and skull models mounted with Diasec, measuring 270 × 194 cm. The repeated title points to a series, and the size of each piece ranks among the most striking works on display.
| Work | Dimensions | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| Anatomy Of Unnamed, Yet Loved | 230 × 90 × 90 cm | Frankenstein monster plush toy parts, plush toy product tags, pins, engraved metal base |
| Homo Derelictus Retextus: Case Study Of Speculative Reconstruction No. 2 | 142 × 100 × 42 cm | Reconstructed stuffed animal parts and skull replicas |
| Codex: Archiving The New Mythos | 22.9 × 15.2 × 2.5 cm | Fabrics from Frankenstein monster plush toys, product tags, one extracted eye |
| Hdr: PA-11335 | 24.6 × 19.6 × 19.6 cm | Stuffed animal parts and skull replicas, reconstructed skull replicas |
What Bae Says About The Work
He writes that Bae’s own words describe the tension at the heart of his practice. “Bodily coherence ‘ is built from parts that agree temporarily but are always unstable because their differences keep showing themselves. The pieces resist settling into a single identity, and it is precisely that refusal to resolve that keeps them compelling.
The Full Range Of The Show
The show moves between modest, close-up works and vast installations. A Geography Of The Monster appears as an archival pigment print, measuring 52 × 39 × 5.5 cm. Extinction Without Ever Existing is a photographic montage of cast-off stuffed toys and skull models, Diasec-mounted, 270 × 260 cm. Index Of Chronic Overreliance And Visceral Death is a variable-size piece from 2022, mixing Frankenstein monster plush toy parts, archival pigment prints of historical anatomical paintings, and adrenal gland models. Rooms Of Accumulation is a variable-size piece from 2023, made from waste textiles taken from the waste stream. Shaping The Collector, The Hoarder And The Accumulator is a lenticular postcard piece from 2025.
2024 produced Zcd-23: Contagious Structure Type 1, which combines pieces from zombie plush toys with an acrylic isolation chamber built into a set of gloves, all mounted on a stainless steel pedestal measuring 149.9 × 61 × 53.3 cm. The title points toward peril, and the piece backs up that warning through its clinical look.
Why This Matters
Bae’s work poses a straightforward inquiry: what constitutes being human? He achieves this by elevating the common items of youth — stuffed animals — into the realm of biological study, thus compelling viewers to reconsider what they regard as natural. The works are aesthetically pleasing, yet they unsettle. Their refusal to conform to a single classification is precisely what endures.
Bae’s exhibition is currently up online at his website and Instagram, allowing viewers to take in his full body of work. Every piece stands as a single entry in a broader system of classification, a point within a network of gathered items. Assembled together, these works paint a picture of a world where the line separating commodity from living thing has grown too faint to trace.
The work is a reminder that the body is not fixed. It’s provisional, assembled from parts that don’t always agree, and it falls apart at the slightest provocation. Bae’s stuffed animals are the perfect stand-ins for that argument. They were meant to comfort, but they’ve been reassembled into something stranger.
One identity never fully takes hold, and it’s that stubborn refusal to settle that keeps the viewer hooked. Bae’s work is a meditation on the provisional nature of the self, built from the detritus of consumer culture. It’ delivers a beautiful, strange, and deeply unsettling experience.
Source material: “20 Vibrant Artworks By Sungho Bae Filled With Wild Textures And Unexpected Details,” Bored Panda.
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