HEJUM BÄ

Bä has always worked by watching. Her paintings tend to begin with something glimpsed in passing – on a subway, in the street, on a screen left open on someone else’s lap – small, unremarkable moments that most people let go of immediately, but that she carries with her, sometimes for years, until they find their way onto canvas. This body of work began with an observation Bä made on a Seoul subway, in a neighbourhood shaped by ambition and everyday striving. It was here that she began noticing a dissonance running beneath the everyday: conversations about investment and cryptocurrency surfacing in the same breath as concerns more commonly associated with family and care. The observation is a personal one, but it sits inside a larger shift – by early 2025, South Korea’s cryptocurrency exchanges counted more registered accounts than the country’s stock market counted individual investors, a milestone widely reported in local financial media. Bä’s paintings take this shift as a point of departure, a real condition of the society she paints from.

”This image gave me a kind of breaking of my stereotyped intentions of bitcoiners and mothers at the same time,” she says – two identities she had never thought to place in the same sentence. “My assignment in my practice is not to tell that kind of story line by line,” she explains, treating observation as material to be transformed rather than documented.

It was this pattern – bodies bent over phones, talking about cryptos, tracking numbers invisible to anyone else – that drew Bä toward the chart itself as an image. A cryptocurrency chart is a distinctive way of picturing time: flat, always moving, its colored lines pressing rightward as new data renews the trend, a form of change with little relation to how time is actually felt in a body. Bä found an older, slower counterpart to that motion in milk, which falls like a chart, its flow shaped by gravity. This downward movement takes on an irregular line, placed alongside the constantly shifting lines of cryptocurrency charts.

Rather than collapsing into a single meaning, the two forms of movement remain distinct yet visible together, opening up new possibilities between value and anxiety, life and matter.

She does not transcribe that motion faithfully, though. Left to itself, gravity would resolve into something too clean – the smooth, repeatable descent a chart produces on a screen. Bä works against this. ”When I decided to use the gravity power, it doesn’t give me any other room for thinking,” she says, treating gravity as a force to resist as much as to follow. What results is a vocabulary of irregular, vivid forms, closer to the unpredictability of a body than to a line rendered clean on a screen, and this friction, between a chart’s obedient flatness and the canvas’s refusal of it, is where the two subjects of the exhibition – market and body – actually meet.

That same instinct carries through the exhibition’s key works. In the painting Milk of a Bitcoiner-Mother (2026), the flow of milk and the volatility of the market become a single gesture. There Is an Ocean in the Pregnant Belly (2024–25) and I Envy the Mother Conches (2026) turn from currency toward the body, using the coiled architecture of shells and the sensation of submersion to approach maternal instinct as something physical and lived, rather than sentimental. “I imagined in the pregnant belly there is an ocean,” Bä says of the image’s origin. Mosungchoosang (2024–26), whose Korean title names the effort of identifying maternal instinct itself, binds the whole body of work together: the heightened awareness that comes with pregnancy, she suggests, asks the same kind of attention as reading an unstable chart – both are attempts to find clarity inside something that evolves.

Bä works in saturated reds, yellows, and blues – a palette that could easily be mistaken for pure decoration. She has never accepted that reading. “The quality of each colour is very chemical,” she says, treating colour as a material fact rather than a mood or an ornament – closer, in her account, to the vivid, unstable palette of water itself than to ornament for its own sake. What she is after, across every canvas, is raw vitality: the sense of two systems, a body and a market, both alive, both unwilling to settle.

Bä’s thinking has been shaped by writers who treat the maternal body as entangled with technology and thought rather than pure biology – N. Katherine Hayles, Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément, Myriam Szejer among them. Awakened holds its two subjects apart rather than folding one into the other. As Bä puts it, her aim is simply “to raise more understanding, or more interest,” about conditions rarely granted the same seriousness – market, body, and sea, brought for the first time onto a single surface.