K-ART FOCUS For Ba He-jum, bitcoin and breastfeeding are not so far apart

By Lee Hae-rin

• Published Sep 11, 2026 7:07 PM KST

Artist masters finding commonality in seemingly unrelated ideas

What do cryptocurrency charts, breastfeeding and mother conches have in common?

For Korean painter Ba He-jum, the answer is not merely an unlikely combination. It is an invitation to look again at the abstract forces already shaping everyday life.

In her recent solo exhibition, “Awakened,” Ba brings together the fluctuating lines of crypto markets, the unruly physicality of milk and pregnancy, and the mysteries of ocean. The show, presented by Italian gallery MASSIMODECARLO at Mahkjip, a hanok-based space in Seoul’s Samcheong neighborhood, ran from Aug. 29 through Sept. 5 during Seoul Art Week.

It marked Ba’s first solo exhibition in Seoul since joining the gallery’s roster last year. The show featured eight new paintings, including “Milk of a Bitcoiner-Mother” (2026), “There Is an Ocean in the Pregnant Belly” (2024-2026) and “I Envy the Mother Conches” (2026).

Finding a common theme in unlikely combinations defines her identity as an artist.

Born in Seoul in 1987, Ba studied painting and printmaking at Ewha Womans University and at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart.

Now based in Seoul and a participant in Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar’s practice-based research program, she has held solo shows at Kumho Museum of Art, SeMA Storage and MASSIMODECARLO Hong Kong. Her works were on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's 2021 “Young Korean Artists” exhibition and Frieze Seoul Focus Asia in 2022.

Ba gets pairing ideas in the ordinary.

The idea for "Awakened," for example, was born in the Seoul subway.

One evening, during a sharp rise in bitcoin prices, Ba noticed nearly everyone around her looking at cryptocurrency charts on their phones on their way home from work at Gangnam Station. The image lingered.

“I was not interested in that field at all,” she said during a recent interview with The Korea Times at the exhibition. “But everyone was looking at the app, moving their hands and looking at colored lines pointing to different time zones. Those lines keep moving, and values produced around the world make those lines.”

To Ba, the sight was striking because it made abstraction feel less distant from life.

“People often think of abstraction as something separated from everyday life,” she said. “But the abstraction I was looking for was something alive, moving, beating — not always beautiful, but containing some of life’s bitterness.”

A second subway encounter deepened the idea. Passing through Daechi Station, a pregnant Ba heard a group of parents discussing private academies and their children’s education before their conversation turned to cryptocurrency. The moment upended the fixed images she had held of both crypto investors and mothers.

“Motherhood can have different indicators depending on the era,” she said. “I realized cryptocurrency could also become one such indicator.”

So Ba used them as materials for painting. In “Milk of a Bitcoiner-Mother,” she imagined a person who both invests in bitcoin and breastfeeds — a figure who could be herself, but also anyone else. The work draws a visual connection between downward-moving market graphs and milk that flows down the body.

“Milk comes out of the body and runs down it, creating lines,” she said. “A bitcoin chart can also keep falling. We pursue virtual values on one hand, but on the other, we always live with bodily realities we cannot resist — sweat, milk, the body breaking down.”

The comparison is not intended as a neat metaphor. Ba is more interested in holding unlikely conditions together: market volatility and physical vulnerability, digital desire and the labor of care.

For Ba, a falling line can also be an ascending one, depending on where the viewer stands.

“No matter how much I paint a descent, if someone looks at it from below, it becomes an ascent,” she said. “Once something becomes a painting, it stops. But the ways of reading it remain open.”

The ocean provides another thread across the exhibition. During her pregnancy, Ba found biological description and medical indicator useful but insufficient to make the experience fully comprehensible. So she began imagining every pregnant person as carrying an ocean inside.

“It was mysterious,” she said. “There were all these indicators through different devices, but they could not tell me 100 percent of the truth. I imagined there was a grand ocean inside every pregnant belly,” — a concrete image that felt primordial, profound and teeming with life, she explained.

That image linked her earlier images of cryptocurrency — a digital realm she associated with both danger and seduction — to the unseen depths of the sea.

In “I Envy the Mother Conches,” Ba turns to the shells of conches, which carry both protective hardness and environmental traces. She was drawn to the fact that conches pass on genetic instructions enabling their young to build shells of their own for self-protection.

Ba does not expect viewers to decode every reference in her painting. She sees openness, rather than instant readability, as one of abstraction’s strength.

“Leaving things open is one of the virtues abstraction gives us,” she said.