Exhibition Information

Exhibition View
(출처= 휘슬)

Exhibition View
(출처= 휘슬)

Exhibition View
(출처= 휘슬)

Exhibition View
(출처= 휘슬)

			The cards began to shuffle. It gently exposes the face above the hand as it inserts itself among the
other cards. Finally, the softly curved card falls below the thumb, randomly tangles up, then fans
out neatly. A fierce battle of wits begins in guessing the opponent’s hand. Many struggles with
how to interpret Hejum Bä’s work. Is there a different meaning behind it? Perhaps it is because
of the particular shape and intense color peeking through abstract forms and the unexpectedly
more specific titles.
COMBO is the third solo exhibition by the artist in 2021. Following Fyka Foretold… (2021, SeMA
Storage) and PLOTLESS (2021, Kumho Museum), this exhibition deals with microscopic
narratives of abstract reasoning that began with larger structures. Meanwhile, armed with
mystery, the artist sought to explore the possibility of implicit communication with the viewer.
However, COMBO gives a clearer view of Hejum Bä’s journey in pursuing structure as generated
by the chain of abstraction and the artist’s unique process of constructing a pictorial ecosystem.
Hejum Bä has made various attempts to examine the relationship between shape and color within
the painting and to realize the process of cogitation. It is not very meaningful to try to interpret the
forms in Bä’s work. It is more efficient to appropriate the language of abstract painting to glimpse
and infer the artist’s thinking structure. In the past, Bä deconstructed and recombined the “motile
image” on the canvas to experiment with the motility within a painting and linked it to abstraction
such as intense color relationships and language elements. Afterward, Bä introduced ‘unknowing’
and attempted to approach the structure generating from the chain of thoughts differently from
traditional ideas.
The artist is a person who creates narratives in paintings. Bä introduced the plot concept and
structuralized her work by connecting its past, present, and future. As if to imply intersecting
temporality, the artist often duplicates and repeats icons from her work, interestingly sharing
that, “[she] put a hyperlink in the title.” The same is true of the black dots that appear everywhere
in the exhibition. 

The exhibition title COMBO is a word commercialized to recall a sense of continuous striking.
Hejum Bä compares this word to the moment when various planes and colors bond on the canvas
to reveal a form in sync with her thoughts. In other words, “COMBO” in this exhibition symbolizes
the chain action of abstract painting. When an image appears from ‘None and Unknown’ and
power struggles between form and color are combined or extinguished to create balance within
the frame, meaning is generated from the remaining image. The title abbreviates this pleasure
into one word.
The artist’s decision on the titling of each work is also an extension of abstraction. The title
of the work is determined in its final process, reflecting the established content. In particular,
among the two works representing in this exhibition, IN EQUILIBRIUM (2021) depicts elements
naturally occurring inside the painting slowly coming into balance by grounding their positions,
and COMBO (2021) most accurately demonstrates the situation where, as forms fragmentize,
meaning is immediately acquired. With an impressive deep blue stroke Rolling Dice (2021)
has a pink shape at the top of the work, a “trigger” for the entire painting. As it breaks, its forms
pour down, speeding up the brush strokes to compose a new movement. Shuffling (2021) is a
work that recalls a sense of direction when surfaces mix in hand. The artist shuffles a number of
objects consisting of faces toward the person who is the object of confrontation. Viewers will get a
glimpse at the deck of colors mixing randomly at the painter’s hand.


Soohyun Kim, Curator