The works of Bae Bien-U, a point of contact between the heavens and the earth The unique eye of Bae Bien-U can be equally identified in his other works when he deciphers the point of contact between the visible world and the invisible world in nature as well as in the landscape. It is well known that Bae Bien-U has been greatly inspired by pines and pine groves. In the photographs of pines, setting the dominant line vertical in accordance with the image of standing trees, he seems to have expressed them as creatures which rejoin the heavens and the earth(and the nether world). He apparently perceived an invisible horizontal line, which connects the divided regions, inhered in the succession of vertical trees. We can even say that individual pines suggest human beings, while a pine grove reminds us of a thick, jostling crowd. He has preferred to photograph the pines on the hills in the suburbs of the old town of Gyeongju. Although pine trees can be seen anywhere in Korea and a pine grove is a landscape familiar to the Koreans, these photographs are more than visual records of a typical images of the nature in Korea. The architecture of Jongmyo〔the ancestral shrine of the royal family〕 which he photographed before is a work of formative art itself, while a pine grove or a landscape and nature in general, always exists chaos. When a photographer triggers a camera at nature, he will automatically record an aspect of the chaos. Whether the photograph is deserving of the name of art is another question. Taking an artistic photograph would need an eye to decipher an artistic form in the middle of the chaos. A photograph as a work of art would give some formation to the chaos, while a photograph in the usual meaning just clips an aspect of the chaos in a photographic frame. In the photographs of Bae Bien-U, the pine grove is not taken simply as a landscape, that is, a part of the nature. You would feel as if the trees or the grove, given a clear formation by the photographer, was coming out of the landscape and approaching you directly. Such an impression on his works tells you that they should be called artistic rather than photographic.