Mina Ham’s
work begins by bringing back into painting memories from childhood, emotions
that remain long after certain events, and figures and landscapes that have
become blurred over time. The artist leaves on the surface sensations that are
difficult to explain clearly, such as voices, body temperature, smells, light,
and colors from situations she has experienced.
Blurred landscapes seen without
glasses by the seaside in childhood, the time she spent in Donghae and Busan,
and memories of people and Russian sailors encountered near the waterfront are
recurring points of departure in her paintings. These memories appear less as
portraits of specific individuals than as masses of emotion that remain between
the past and the present.
In her
early works, Mina Ham dealt with the incompleteness of memory through blurred
faces, indistinct expressions, and the sensation of distorted bodies. The ‘Node
of Sleep’(2018) series began from sleep disorders, fatigue, and the unconscious
act of twisting the body, translating the state of a body bent and pressed down
regardless of one’s will into figural forms.
In the images from this period,
the figures do not clearly state who they are, and their emotions are not
clearly readable either. Rather than describing the eyes and expressions of the
figures in detail, the artist creates room for viewers to project their own
memories and emotions through blurred colors, winding brushstrokes, and
mass-like forms.
Through
the solo exhibitions 《Where Would I
Be》(Galerie ERD, Busan, 2020) and 《Backwater》(Galerie ERD, Seoul, 2022), the
artist’s figures appear more clearly as “beings who have come from somewhere
and are heading somewhere.” The children whose gender, nationality, and origin
remain ambiguous are forms that had been isolated within the artist’s memory,
as well as beings in whom an unsettled identity overlaps with a desire to
return to the past.
In particular, in Trigger(2021),
the gun is not presented as a tool of threat or violence, but as a device of
desire, courage, and hope to move toward something. The children from this
period are not drawn as fragile objects of protection, but as figures who
defend themselves, endure, and search for their own direction within uncertain
environments.
After the
2023 solo exhibition 《ID Picture》(Galerie ERD, Busan), Mina Ham’s work more directly addresses the
issues of identity and documentation in relation to figures. The ‘ID Picture’
series evokes formats that hold a person at a particular moment, such as ID
photographs, graduation albums, missing-person posters, and unmanned photo
booth images.
In the 2024 solo exhibition 《Arcadia》(Galerie ERD, Seoul), she then unfolds scenes of childhood in which
fantasy and reality, desire and desirelessness are mixed, through memories of
picking wild raspberries, her maternal grandmother’s tomato field, and images
of children guarding tomato and lemon forests.
By the
time of her recent solo exhibition 《Badawi》(PIBI Gallery, 2026), these concerns
expand toward questions of movement, drifting, generational inheritance,
wounds, and recovery. The ‘The Human Chrysalis’(2025) series, the ‘Badawi’
series, and the ‘The First Flutter’ series together show the moment in which an
existence is recorded as a fixed image, while also presenting the sensation of
a life that nevertheless continues to move and change.
