Originally spotted via Racewire, Chan-hyo Bae is a South Korean born, London-based artist playing on Empire and the ambiguity of embracing “Britishness” as the “Other”.

“The sun never sets over the British Empire.” The country of Queen, the country with pride in her history and tradition, still seems to be breathing in Great Britain. I try to become British just as a child pretends to be a mother by dressing in her clothes and making up with her cosmetics. The attempt to become British is to me what a child tries to do in dressing as an adult. Although the mother’s clothes are unsuitable for the child, the child still tries to dress as its mother, trying to express its existence as another person. The language of a child. In becoming a British lady, which may seem gauche, it is my language.

Bae’s self-portraits in costume, capturing the absurdity of what the artist describes as trying to “inhabit a role that one can never quite possess or understand” are now on exhibit at London’s Saatchi Gallery.