A Second Soy Sauce

Lay Dohyun Baek's work out in sequence and a single direction appears. A mouse that eats fingernails. Instructions for the event of losing his ashes. Don Quixote and his stool. From the works of 2023–24, preoccupied with waste and uselessness, to Residue (2026): soy-sauce-stained hanji sealed under wax. An artist who once pulled uncomfortable things forward now spends his time covering them over.

He entered Goldsmiths on a painting portfolio, made sculpture for four years, and returned to painting after graduating. The reasons he gives are that installation had become difficult to sustain, and that he wanted to keep a drawing habit — not an aesthetic conversion so much as what he could continue doing, and what his hands wanted to keep doing. The four years of sculpture look less like a settled identity than a period spent testing the spatial and conceptual languages available to him.

What has happened since is not a return but an accumulation. Sculpture left him a sense of space. Performance left him a body. The early works left him a sense of humour. Painting has been laid on top of all of it.

His method reduces to a single verb: to cover. He builds layers, establishes a dense centre, lets what lies beneath show through where the surface stays transparent, and then lays another sheet of hanji over a passage he wants hidden. Completion arrives by feel rather than by rule. He says he often goes too far, and that when he does, he covers it and starts again.

But what he covers does not entirely disappear. After one performance, once the hanji had been taken down and the wall repainted several times, the soy sauce came back through. He did not design this. He noticed it while working. Most of his practice is in those two sentences.

The choice of material follows the same logic. He uses soy sauce, but not the traditional kind — not the sauce fermented from meju and brine, but jin-ganjang, the industrially produced soy sauce he actually grew up with. He sets up the first reading — Korean artist, Korean material — and lays beneath it a second layer on which that reading begins to fail. A material expected to authenticate an identity, used to demonstrate that the authentication cannot be made.

Recently he has begun working with William Morris patterns, one of them cut into a garment worn in performance. In conversation he connected Morris to floral patterns used in the Korean royal court.

The historical record is stranger than that, and more useful to the work — though it does not run through Morris himself. The interiors in question are Huijeongdang and Daejojeon at Changdeokgung, rebuilt after the fire of 1917. Research published in 2026 by Ji-Young Lee, a V&A Research Fellow whose earlier research reconstructed eleven of the wallpaper designs used in the palace's restoration, finds that the palace largely passed over the explicitly "Oriental" wallpapers Victorian manufacturers were producing in quantity, and took floral ones instead: peony-like motifs printed with illusionistic silk, flock and tapestry effects. Familiar meanings arriving on unfamiliar surfaces. Inside those rooms, she argues, British manufacturing, Japan's imperial distribution networks, local practice and colonial politics intersected.

In the trade, national names had already become descriptions of surface. Labels such as French, Italian and Japanese referred to decorative effects rather than places; the "French" rooms made for the Korean court were often furnished with British-made paper. An Essex & Co. pattern book of 1899 offered a wallpaper called The Corea Design, alongside The Tokyo Design by C. F. A. Voysey, whose name did not appear on it. Korea, in that book, was a surface effect.

And one further detail, which belongs to him more than to the wallpaper. Korean interiors were already paper: walls, ceilings, doors, windows, columns, floors. The imported surface did not bring paper into the room. It laid another surface onto a material that was already there.

Which is the soy sauce argument arrived at from the other side. The sauce reads as Korean, then complicates that reading through industrial production, colonial history and personal memory. The floral pattern reads as English — and once it is set beside the history of imported wallpaper in the Korean palace, another set of movements appears: Britain, Japan, Korea; manufacture, circulation, appropriation; foreign surfaces laid over an architecture already made of paper.

In the soy sauce, that second layer is fully argued. In the Morris, it is not yet visible in the work.

The flowers are not decoration. They are a second soy sauce.