Image: MASSIMODECARLO, Milan
MASSIMODECARLO is presenting ‘Awakened’, a solo exhibition by Seoul-based artist Hejum Bä, at its Seoul location from 29 August to 5 September 2026. The exhibition is Bä’s first with the gallery in Seoul and is installed in a hanok, a traditional Korean house, at 27 Jahamun-ro 8-gil in Jongno-gu. All of the works on view are new and were made specifically for the exhibition.
The paintings bring together three subjects that Bä has not previously placed on the same canvas: cryptocurrency, the ocean and motherhood. According to the gallery’s exhibition text, the project began with an observation Bä made on a Seoul subway in a neighborhood shaped by ambition and everyday striving. She noticed conversations about investment and cryptocurrency occurring alongside concerns associated with family and care, an encounter that became the starting point for the new body of work.
Bä’s practice is grounded in observation. Her paintings often develop from moments glimpsed in passing—on public transport, in the street or on a phone screen—that she later transforms into abstract compositions. For ‘Awakened’, cryptocurrency charts provide one of the exhibition’s central visual references. Bä describes the charts as images of time: flat, constantly moving lines that extend across a screen as new data changes the direction of the trend.
The works set that digital movement against the slower physical motion of milk. In ‘Milk of a Bitcoiner-Mother’ (2026), the flow of milk and the volatility of the market become a single painted gesture. The exhibition also includes ‘There Is an Ocean in the Pregnant Belly’ (2024–25), ‘I Envy the Mother Conches’ (2026), ‘Mosungchoosang’ (2024–26), ‘Clumps near the Incoming Tide’ (2025–26), ‘Shell’ (2026) and the title work, ‘Awakened’ (2025–26).
The ocean and maternal body appear through images of shells, tides and submersion. Bä has said that she imagined an ocean inside a pregnant belly, while ‘Mosungchoosang’—a Korean title referring to the effort of identifying maternal instinct—connects the heightened awareness associated with pregnancy to the attention required to read an unstable chart. Rather than treating the market, body and sea as one unified metaphor, the exhibition keeps the subjects distinct while allowing their forms and movements to meet on the canvas.
Bä uses saturated reds, yellows and blues, describing the colors as “chemical” materials rather than ornament or mood. Born in Seoul in 1987, she studied Painting and Printmaking at Ewha Womans University and continued her studies at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. She is participating in a practice-based research program at Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations at MASSIMODECARLO Seoul Studio in 2025, MASSIMODECARLO Hong Kong in 2024, Frieze Seoul Focus Asia in 2022 and the Kumho Museum of Art in 2021. ‘Awakened’ is open daily from 11am to 7:30pm, with Samcheong Night hours extending to 10pm.
