Hejum Bä’s “I want to buy unseen eyes”
By Mioie Kwok
Installation view of "Hejum Ba: I want to buy unseen eyes" at Massimodecarlo, Hong Kong, 2024. Courtesy Massimodecarlo.
Hejum Bä
I want to buy unseen eyes
Massimodecarlo
Hong Kong
July 7–August 24
The visual landscape of our digital world is meticulously designed to capitalize on our instinctual response to colors, as research shows that up to 90 percent of our initial impressions of consumer brands are influenced by emotional associations to colors alone. However, constant engagement with social media can give rise to visual fatigue, causing all shades to coalesce into a blur of amorphous shapes and forms. Korean netizens describe this phenomenon as 안 본 눈 삽니다 (“I want to buy unseen eyes”), which encapsulates the desire to reset one’s overstimulated senses and escape the endless influx of digital content we encounter daily.
Such desire for sensory rejuvenation underpinned Hejum Bä’s debut solo exhibition at Hong Kong’s Massimodecarlo gallery, curated by Valentina Buzzi. Bä distills our interactions with electronic interfaces into their fundamental chromatic components, reshaping our experiences into atypical geometries situated within precise structural configurations. Her provocative artwork titles complement her experiential approach by offering subtle textual cues that hint at the conceptual inspirations behind each painting. In A Bitcoiner’s Hope (2024), a pink-and-purple circular form hovers atop an angular yellow block, positioned on a solid base of intersecting orange and red planes with notched, jagged contours. Each shape creates a rhythmic pattern of peaks and valleys; mimicking the fluctuating graph lines commonly seen in financial data visualizations and illustrating cryptocurrency’s volatile nature. Bä explained that she had observed the emergence of Bitcoin in South Korea and was astonished by the number of people who had invested their life savings in intangible, high-risk assets. For A Bitcoiner’s Hope she layered vibrant swathes of colors until they overlapped and morphed into muted tones, visually analogizing the initial exuberance surrounding the cryptocurrency boom’s shift toward more sober, pragmatic perspectives.
HEJUM BA, A Bitcoiner’s Hope, 2024, oil on canvas, 162.2 × 193.9 × 5 cm. Courtesy Massimodecarlo.
Discussing her creative process, Bä explained how in her Seoul studio, she lays out all of her canvases and fine-tunes the composition of one work in relation to how she conceptualizes another, until all the colors synthesize and converge as a cohesive, interconnected whole. Accordingly, every color Bä mixed, every line she painted, was conceived to convey a distinct physicality. In Heavy Swipe to Unlock (2024), two thick green lines run across the canvas to evoke the familiar swiping motion that our fingers instinctively follow due to our habitual use of touchscreen technology. Inspired by observing a fellow train passenger struggling to log into a banking application via pattern lock screen, Bä highlights our collective, contemporary gestures, rather than the specific functions they serve. By distilling these commonplace motions into abstract forms, Bä urges us to contemplate the mechanized behaviors that have become so deeply embedded in our daily lives.
HEJUM BA, Heavy Swipe to Unlock, 2024, oil on canvas, 169.6 × 193.9 × 4 cm. Courtesy Massimodecarlo.
Another central tenet of Bä’s practice is the idea of “sheer optimism.” Distinct from mere positivity, Bä views optimism as an essential mental framework for navigating the demands of contemporary capitalism, a perspective embodied by her use of vivid colors. Presented upside-down and at a low height on the wall, An Uplifting Painting (2024) emanates a buoyant, audacious energy. Strands of brown paint defy the pull of gravity, dripping upward amid patches of deep green and light pink hues. The exhibition’s curation imaginatively emphasized Bä’s mindset through the unconventional positioning of her canvases—like Uplifting, A Bitcoiner’s Hope was hung diagonally at the center of the gallery, suspended by wires. This conceptual framing challenged viewers to transcend passive observation and engage with the exhibition through “unseen eyes,” an attitude that ought to permeate our everyday lived experiences.
Candid, objective, and egalitarian, Bä’s painterly practice cryptically maps the circuitous flow of images defining our contemporary existence, encouraging viewers to look beyond the confines of our screen-mediated world. Rather than a didactic critique of our technology-fixated culture, Bä’s works emerge as an empathetic gesture—a technicolor invitation to rediscover our relationship with the world through renewed curiosity and wonder.
HEJUM BA, An Uplifting Painting, 2024, oil on canvas, 112.2 × 193.9 × 4 cm. Courtesy Massimodecarlo.
Mioie Kwok is a former editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
