Emerita Baik

Emerita Baik

My guess watch has no tears, therefore she suffers so much more, 2024
Aluminium, acrylic paint, oil pastel
35" x 18" x 15"
Courtesy the artist

Emerita Baik is a New Zealand artist based in New York City, working across sculpture, printmaking, and installation. She holds a BFA (Hons) from Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa and an MFA from Columbia University. Baik is the recipient of the 2023 Fulbright Award.

Recent exhibitions include Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2023; Folded Memory, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2023; Great Hunger, Robert Heald Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2023; The Inner Lives of Islands, Te Tuhi, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2021; and Bedrock, The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 2021.

Emerita Baik’s practice merges personal and collective histories through the manipulation of images, color, form and materiality. Her practice examines how diasporic experiences shape the ways we relate to the world, revealing themselves through the hybridization of images. By abstracting these photographs into sculptural forms, she articulates the emotional complexities embedded within them. The tension between contraction and expansion in her sculptural language reflects the internal dialogue of uncertainty inherent in cultural hybridity. Color dissolves the boundaries between these forms, redefining the fragmented body and disrupting its relationship to space.