Mina Ham, The Human Chrysalis, 2025, Oil on canvas, 40.9x31.8cm ©PIBI Gallery
PIBI Gallery presents a solo exhibition 《Badawi》 by artist Mina Ham, on view from
March 5 to April 18.
Working primarily with figure painting, Ham has consistently
explored personal memory and emotion, as well as the ways in which they
accumulate over time. Although her work often originates in childhood events
and subsequent lived experiences, it departs from faithful representation,
instead giving visual form to the traces of incomplete memory and affect.
Contrasting color palettes, emphatic lines, and compositions in
which blurred marks coexist with areas of emptiness articulate the
psychological states of her figures, while restrained or omitted facial
features leave space for multiple interpretations.
Mina Ham, The Human Chrysalis, 2025, Oil on canvas, 40.9x31.8cm ©PIBI Gallery
The exhibition title “Badawi” derives from the term “Bedouin,”
referring to desert nomads. In Arabic, Badawi (يودب) bears a phonetic resemblance to the
Korean phrase bada wi (바다 위), meaning “on the sea.” Ham draws on this resonance of sound and
script to evoke images of drifting existence. The letterforms, suggestive of a
vessel moving across waves, are linked to the imagery of movement, understood
here less as physical displacement than as a metaphor for the passage of time
and the flow of emotion.
Inspired by Kim Kirim’s poem “The Sea and the Butterfly” and by
the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies, Ham introduces into her work the
notion of a journey without a predetermined destination, alongside a sustained
sense of life in motion. The image of a butterfly crossing the sea overlaps
with her recurring figures, translating into rhythms of uncertain time and
fluctuating emotional states.
Mina Ham, Badawi-autumn, 2025, Oil, conte, pastel on canvas, 130.3x193.9cm ©PIBI Gallery
The exhibition centers on ‘The Human Chrysalis’ series,
presented alongside works from the ‘Badawi’ and ‘The First Flutter’ series. ‘The
Human Chrysalis’ focuses closely on the faces of indeterminate figures, evoking
associations with butterfly specimens, identification photographs, or missing
person posters. The series attends to moments in which an existence is recorded
and held in suspension at a particular point in time.
‘The First Flutter’ incorporates hanji, or traditional Korean
paper, to add physical layers into the pictorial surface, extending the tension
between memory and the present. By contrast, the ‘Badawi’ series depicts
figures drifting across the sea more directly, presenting movement as imagery
closely aligned with lived processes and the flow of emotion.
Mina Ham, The first flutter, 2025, Charcoal, paper on canvas, 27.3x22cm ©PIBI Gallery
This new solo exhibition by Mina Ham unfolds through recurring
figures and a linear spatial arrangement, articulating states that hover
between movement and fixation, and between the present and memory. As the
individual works coalesce into a single extended sequence, visitors encounter
the rhythm of a drifting existence through their own passage through the
gallery.
In this experience, the notion of the nomad converges with
contemporary life marked by uncertainty, opening the exhibition to renewed
possibilities of interpretation.
