Korea’s ‘painter of light’ finally gets national spotlight

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.

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.

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

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.”

Material, for Bang, was central to making light visible. She stained hanji, earth and nonwoven fabric with diluted natural pigments and earth from the Roussillon region of southern France, building up veils of color through repetitive soaking, drying and layering.

She also adapted the traditional Korean backside-coloring technique, applying pigment from both back and front so that light seems to emanate from within the surface.

“She no longer simply painted on a canvas studying upright,” the curator said. “She placed it flat on the floor similarly to calligraphy, entered the painting with her whole body and let the movement of her hand and the seeping of ink on paper become one.”

The exhibition unfolds across six sections, from an introductory space anchored by a recreated stained-glass panel from Chartres Cathedral’s “Birth of Light” (2019) window to galleries focused on early works, soil-based abstraction and her hallmark circular compositions.

A recreation of Bang Hai Ja's “Birth of Light” (2019) is on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, Wednesday. The piece is one of the four modern stained-glass works Bang designed for the historic Saint-Piat chapel in Chartres Cathedral in France. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin

A highlight is “Earth of the Sky” (2008), created the year novelist Park Kyung-ni, author of the epic “Toji (Land),” passed away, in which a horizon of diffused light becomes a meditation on sky and earth, life and death. Bang, who wrote poems and essays herself, maintained close ties with writers such as Park and poet Kim Ji-ha, and her paintings often carry a quiet literary, narrative charge.

Bang’s late paintings, including “From Light to Light” (2014), form what the curator sees as a culmination to her decades-long inquiry.

“From the 2000s onward, her reflections on light seem to settle into a very stable yet expansive form,” the curator said. “The works vibrate between darkness and brightness, suggesting that light is not just something we see, but the force that finally lets things be seen.”

Bang Hai Ja's "Earth of the Sky" (2008) is on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin

By assembling rarely seen early canvases, intimate archival photographs and late monumental works in one place, MMCA Cheongju aims to position Bang not only as an emblematic figure of spiritual abstraction, but also as a key woman painter in Korea’s modern art history whose contribution, curators argue, has been overlooked.

“I hope this will be a starting point for reading Bang Hai Ja’s art beyond the label of ‘mystical’ painting,” the curator said. “Her light belongs as much to art history as it does to any realm of faith.”

"Bang Hai-ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth" runs through Sept. 27 at the MMCA's Cheongju branch.