Access
Hejum Bä
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is delighted to present, Access, a solo exhibition by Hejum Bä, marking her anticipated European debut. In this exhibition, Bä presents a new body of work that demonstrates her embrace of abstraction, signifying a deliberate departure from concrete and tangible shapes. This artistic choice enables a nuanced exploration of the evolving paradigms within our technologically mediated reality. By relinquishing strict adherence to forms, Bä's work ventures into a realm where colours intermingle freely, disregarding the boundaries imposed by conventional shapes. This dissolution of rigid structures can be interpreted as a metaphorical response to the accelerating speed of information and our increasingly rapid interactions with images and technology.
Bä's artistic practice is profoundly influenced by her astute comprehension of modern communication mechanisms, encompassing both verbal and nonverbal language, as well as the intricate codes we employ in our daily lives. Rather than solely stemming from pure emotion or intuition, Bä's vibrant abstract compositions serve as layered representations of movements observed in our interactions with smartphones, such as "swiping" and "tapping." Through explorations of surface and background, the interplay of colours and lines, her paintings delve into the intricate relationship between visual elements.
In Bä's artistic vision, the canvases do not function as standalone messages but rather as reflections of the overwhelming flow of messages that saturate our existence. By eschewing figurative subjects, each artwork becomes an analysis of the process of unlocking meaning, akin to navigating from one side of the screen to another or deciphering messages from one side to another, ultimately accessing an alternate dimension.
These elusive rhythms reflect a deep engagement with the dynamic nature of our contemporary existence. The artist's pictorial analysis enters a new phase, seeking to capture and convey the transient and ever-changing nature of our relationship with the digital world.
The Artist
Hejum Bä was born in Seoul in 1987. She lives and works in Seoul, KR.
Hejum practice aims to convert the vocabularies of abstract painting into the indices of crypticity of some aspects of today’s commu-nication, which are manifested in the frequent use of digital devices. Bä colour-field abstraction maps out our changing position towards various types of images, and their circulation as a form of informa-tion. Hejum considers painting the measuring scale of our relation-ships with the digital sphere, in an attempt to mobilize its elements as visually semantic values, by placing atypical shapes and primary colours in specific structural relations. By running the dynamics of shapes and colors she seeks to render a chain of cryptic meanings. As curator Eunjun Lee synthesizes: “Hejum Bä’s paintings can be anything at all and remain an elusive mystery. Never-theless, they open up the world within us and prompt us to wonder whence the forms in our first crayon drawings came. And the answer remains a riddle”.
Graduated from Ewha Women’s University’s Painting/Printmaking program (Seoul) and received her diploma at the Stuttgart State Aca-demy of Art and Design she is now enrolled in the Practice-based Rese-arch Program at Bauhaus University (Weimar, Germany) while working in Seoul.
Recent solo exhibitions include MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique (2023), a presentation for the Focus Asia sector in Frieze Seoul (2022), Kumho Museum of Art (2021), SeMA Storage (2021), OCI Museum of Art (2018), and she has parti-cipated in multiple group shows including Young Korean Artists 2021 at MMCA, DOOSAN Gallery, HITE Collection, Whistle gallery, and Hakgojae Gallery.