Univers
Bang Hai Ja
BANG HAI JA, 1989. NATURAL PIGMENT AND HANJI PAPER ON CANVAS.
As a sickly child growing up in South Korea, Bang Hai Ja lay in bed and watched through the window as light danced off a stream in her grandparents garden. While other children played, she became obsessed with sunlight and how she could capture its illusive beauty through brushes and paints. When she died at the age of 85, Hai Ja was known the world over as ‘the artist of light’, and so celebrated for her depictions of light in all of its forms that the young girl looking out her window would not believe how well she accomplished her dream. Hai Ja’s dedication to light was not purely aesthetic, she understood light as the beginning and end of the everything, the first creation of the universe and to where the universe and its being will all return. This is reflected not just in the work, but in the process. Hai Ja only uses natural materials, infusing her work with the lifeblood of the universe, and begins each piece with a crumpled piece of handmade paper placed in the centre, from which the rest of the composition is built around. This is the first light, the origins of the universe, brought alive by Hai Ja again and again.