Upcoming exhibition “Bang Hai Ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Cheongju, North Chungjeong Province / Newsis

CHEONGJU, North Chungcheong Province — Painter Bang Hai Ja, long celebrated in France as a visionary “painter of light,” is finally receiving a large-scale institutional exhibition in Korea that aims to move her work from the realm of mystical cult favorite into the country’s modern art history.

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) will open “Bang Hai Ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth” at its Cheongju venue on Friday, marking the 140th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Korea and France.

Poster for the "Bang Hai Ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth" exhibition / Courtesy of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

The retrospective, the first dedicated to Bang at a Korean national museum, brings together 67 works and about 100 archival materials spanning from her early experiments in the 1960s to the meditative light-filled abstract paintings of her later years.

More than half of the works are loans from major French institutions including Centre Pompidou and Musee Cernuschi in Paris, with many being shown in Korea for the first time.

“Previous exhibitions (in Korea) were mostly organized while the artist was alive, so there were limits to what would be shown,” curator Bang Cho-ah of MMCA Cheongju said during a press preview, Wednesday. “Now, after the passing, we wanted to unfold the ‘folds between works’ and trace how a pioneering female abstract painter developed her own universe of light.”

Born in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, in 1937, Bang moved to France in 1961 as Korea’s first state-funded art scholarship student, studying at the Ecole national superieure des Beaux-Arts and moving between Paris and Korea. Rather than following dominant movements, she built a distinctive language rooted in inner reflection, drawing on memories of illness and war, religious thoughts and the landscape and soil of both countries.

Bang Hai Ja paints at her studio in Ajoux, France, in this 2020 file photo. Courtesy of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

“Her work is neither fully abstract nor fully figurative,” the curator noted. “It can be read as an image of the universe, a portrait of the heart and a pure abstract painting at the same time.”

Source: Korea Times News