Painter Hejum Bä Stands at a Blank Canvas Each Day, Ready to Reach the State of the Unseen Eye

Hejum Bä’s first solo show at Massimo De Carlo was on view this summer in Hong Kong (July 10–August 24). The title of the show, “I want to buy unseen eyes,” was a phrase she borrowed from a meme she’d seen, something she felt related to the process of her painting. In Hong Kong, her large paintings were full of irregular forms in bright, deep colors. Their nameless shapes are both known and unknown, their energy so very alive. There are lines that make your vision waver, a bright green wiggle within a red field of thick strokes. Bä’s colors draw you in like candy, but the puzzle of each element can leave a perplexing aftertaste. The paintings hang flush with the wall, from the ceiling kitty-corner, and at an odd height right to the edge of a doorway.

Her work is not far from those dancing lights we see behind our eyelids when we close our eyes after looking at something too bright, too colorful, too stimulating. And as she describes it, her painting is her way of making sense of the onslaught of imagery in contemporary life—in the city and on our screens. She stand in front of a white, blank canvas, and allows the painting to take her where it needs to go. Trying to reach that state of “unseen eyes.” Any semblance of recognizable content is done away with and distilled into feelings, emotions, and desires. Whitewall spoke with Bä, who is based in Seoul, about the process of her practice.

WHITEWALL: You first showed in the summer of 2023 with Massimo De Carlo in “Access” in Paris. What was the starting point for that body of work?

HEJUM BÄ: For that show, I put two big poles of my conception of the work and my practice of abstract painting. As a painter, my first attraction in drawing or painting was about imitating something real. Later on, I was deeply interested in eliminating and erasing what looks realistic. And this became very much the foundation of my practice. My memories and all the influences are making shapes on the surface of a plane and putting colors to let them make harmony or contrasts. It attracted me because I didn’t provide any information or pour my efforts into explaining something. But people still understood it or tried to get to know it. I was quite comfortable to not tell too much about it. 

“My memories and all the influences are making shapes on the surface of a plane and putting colors to let them make harmony or contrasts,”

Hejum Bä

WW: Abstraction obscures—it doesn’t give an answer, but it also allows the viewer to find an answer.

HB: Kind of cryptic communication I try to connect to the very basics of painting. How to draw shapes, how to fill the shape with colors. And for that, I didn’t try much to be very technical. I try to stay very solid and stable in terms of making the structures in my paintings. I always try to find irregular forms or shapes that cannot be named. It’s actually quite natural, but somehow it’s very hard to be so natural in painting. Because we are all trying to feel a known shape as we learned. So for me, the elimination is also the way of making such an irregular critique in the forms. 

Colors and Gestures Invoking Personal Experience

WW: And what about your choice of color?

HB: I try to make them stable as well, and then there are some clashes or some feelings, some sense of motility; it doesn’t move at all, but it looks like it is. And lately, I’m giving more strokes, lines, because this is from my personal experience. 

I like to observe people in the subway or in public space. And once in the subway, I saw a person sitting next to me drawing very complex lines when he tried to unlock his mobile phone, something very cryptic. And his conception of this very secret and complex form no one can imitate, that inspired me because I really try to conceive something irregular, something unknown in forms or shapes. 

WW: Are those kinds of the lines something you’re still doing in the studio?

HB: Yes. I am trying to understand the painting or the world we are living in now by rethinking the classical style of abstract painting. I observe these kinds of connecting points in the very mundane in everybody’s life. I try to look at the habits or customs in different countries. I am quite inspired by habitual movements or motions. It says how we deal with changes in our lives.

Painting is such an old genre. There are not so many people who understand painting or contemporary painting in their natural way, because their life is a bit far from viewing paintings or enjoying paintings in my observations. I think as a painter now I have to observe people’s lives.

“I think as a painter now I have to observe people’s lives,”

Hejum Bä

Hejum Bä, “PLOTLESS,” Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021, Courtesy of the artist, photo by Jaeuk Lee.

The Artistic Act of Discovering Something New

WW: Do you see your painting as a pause for your experience of our everyday onslaught of imagery via technology?

HB: My practice needs a lot of time for pauses and breaks because it’s about looking back again and again. I try to become the very first audience to my paintings because somehow painting is not about the act of painting or putting something new, but it’s more like discovering something I haven’t thought of before. Every painting provides me something new. If I cannot discover the suggestions on their own, then I cannot continue the painting. 

It took me quite a long time to accept a part of my practice that is optimism. Painting is a medium that can touch the foundation of who I am or how I can stay in this exterior world—the sense of myself or the viewers themselves. I try to provide positive answers about painting and about the existence of painting, because it’s a sort of flesh, or sort of skin. Eventually, I always choose an optimistic direction. All the colors and shapes and how they are together in one painting, they hold some sort of optimsm.

“It took me quite a long time to accept a part of my practice that is optimism,”

Hejum Bä

An Everyday Practice Going Back to Basics

WW: What is your studio day-to-day like?

HB: I paint every day. It’s an everyday practice. And the everyday practice is in front of an empty canvas. Through everyday practice like that, I have to cling to my paintings or drawings. The only thing left in my hands or in my studio are my own paintings, and I look them over and over or I try to repaint or overpaint or eliminate some elements of what I had before. I also witness all the changes that I give into all the paintings of every day and it grows as time goes by. 

It’s really basic. As a kid, we started drawing or painting that way. We didn’t know all the skills or techniques. We didn’t have the devices at all, so my decision or my mechanism for my creation is only to go back to basics and stay away from the technical things.