Bang Hai Ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Director Kim Sunghee) presents Bang Hai Ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth (Bang Hai Ja : Semer la lumière à travers ciel et terre) at MMCA Cheongju from Friday, April 24 to Sunday, September 27.

Held as part of the celebrations in 2026 marking the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France, this exhibition is a retrospective of Bang Hai Ja (1937–2022), an artist who built a distinctive artistic world nourished by the cultures and arts of both Korea and France while traveling between the two countries. In addition to works from the MMCA Collection, more than half of the exhibited works are France-based pieces being introduced in Korea for the first time, including prestigious collections from the Centre Pompidou and Musée Cernuschi in Paris. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Bang’s major works throughout each period, from her early works of the 1960s to representative late works created after the 2000s.

For Bang Hai Ja, light was never merely an optical phenomenon or a formative effect. Childhood illness, time spent in a mountain temple, the value of life she came to understand while living through the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War, and the light and soil she encountered in both Korea and France all come together to form a stratified world of light within her art. Thus, her light progressed from the light of life to the light of the heart, and then onward into a deeper and more expansive dimension.

As a woman artist exploring abstract painting in its early phase, Bang moved to France in 1961 as the first Korean government–sponsored overseas art student, searching for new artistic possibilities and inner growth. While absorbing the influence of the French art world, rather than following specific trends she instead forged a unique style grounded in introspection and positioned between Asian and European art. Beginning in 1968, she returned to Korea for eight years, where she sought to embody an ancient sense of beauty and the spirit of Korea in her works. Toward the end of this period, her rediscovery of the matière of Hanji (Korean traditional paper), which would become her primary medium in later years, marked a decisive turning point.

In her efforts to freely express the light deep within the heart, Bang cultivated a wide range of media, including painting, murals, printmaking, and stained glass. In the 1970s, she began to actively incorporate Hanji into her practice, and in the 1990s, she turned to natural pigments. From 1996 onward, she utilized the ocher earth of Roussillon in southern France, and in 1997, she began working with nonwoven geotextiles as a primary material. From the 1980s onward, her reflections on light, intertwined with a cosmic perspective, deepened further and culminated in the works of her later years from the 2000s onward. 

Gradually moving away from working on upright canvases, the artist began placing her surfaces horizontally on the floor. In this process, the surface became a space upon which the wrinkles of paper, the permeation of pigment, the nature of materials, and the artist’s own energy responded to one another. Her handling of support and material was inseparable from the act of refining inner light itself. The light contained in Bang’s works holds within it a time of reflection that illuminates both the heart and all that exists between heaven and earth.

Before beginning her work, Bang cultivated her inner self through meditation and qigong. Through this discipline and her continued exploration of expression, she developed a distinctive artistic style. If light reveals what cannot be seen in darkness, then Bang Hai Ja’s light becomes perceptible only when one seeks it through inner contemplation. 

The exhibition is composed of four sections: “The Birth of Light,” “Holding Hands with the Heaven and the Earth,” “Sowing Light,” and “The Path of Becoming Light,” along with an introductory section and an archive space. Following the exhibition path, visitors move through spaces imbued with the pulse of the earth, the realm of the heavens, and the energy of the heart, gradually encountering the world of light that Bang contemplated throughout her life. Tracing the artist’s lifelong journey toward light with a mind always newly born, the exhibition invites a deep understanding of Bang Hai Ja’s artistic world and the meaning of the light within it.

Actor Lee Chung Ah has contributed her talent to the exhibition’s audio guide. Known for her deep appreciation of art, she gently guides visitors through the artist’s world of light with her calm and soothing voice, helping more people connect with the local community through art. The audio guide is available free of charge through the MMCA Exhibition Guide app.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition offers an important opportunity to fully reexamine the artistic world of Bang Hai Ja, whose work has not received sufficient attention in the history of Korean contemporary art. By presenting both works from the MMCA Collection and works held in France which have never before been introduced in Korea, we hope to provide an occasion for visitors to explore this artist’s practice more broadly.”