Bang Hai Ja

Bang Hai Ja was born in Seoul in 1937 and lives in France since 1961. She belongs to the first generation of Korean abstract painters and one of the highly skilled painters in the World (Pierre Cabanne).

Her debut in Paris was immediately noticed by the writer, historian of art and art critic Pierre Courthion who did not cease to encourage her. It is in fact, outside her country that Bang Hai Ja will really discover her roots and that she deliberately chooses to keep in reference her Korean culture, the techniques, and the approach of the universe. Between the Korea of her childhood and youth and France where she looked long and searchingly at Van Gogh, Cezanne, Kandinsky and Paul Klee, she has cast a link, a binding wire, to “reach deep into myself”, she says, and unite East and West, the calligraphic tradition and the revelation of abstraction.

She uses Korean paper made by hand from leaves and plants, according to age-old traditions, by Buddhist nuns. It can be rumpled and shaped with the fingers. She also uses unwoven fabric known as geotextile, which she likes for its transparency. Bang Hai Ja who works with the fabric stretched out flat before her, on the floor, paints with it not on it. She paints repeatedly both sides. The colours are set side by side, merge, create subtle shades and upon this dreamlike background there arise those imaginary or lyrical visions that she also speaks of in her poems, those cellular bursts shot through with a light whose impact on the emotions is a source of happiness.

Many exhibitions were devoted to Bang Hai Ja in France, Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, United States, Japan, Monaco, Spain and in Canada. Bang Hai Ja had over 60 personal exhibitions and took part in many collective exhibitions. Pierre Courthion, Gilbert Lascault, Pierre Cabanne, Charles Juliet, Maurice Benamou, Andre Sauge, Olivier Germain-Thomas, Michael Gibson, Valere Bertrand, Patrice de la Perriere and many others wrote on her works.

Bang Hai Ja received the ‘Grand Prix, Painter of the Overseas’ on the Day of the painters in Korea, on December 5, 2008.