Water and Fire Alike
2025. 9. 20 – 11. 1 | [GALLERIES] GALLERY MAC
Jeong-A Bang
소름 쫙, 2025, Acrylic Coloring on cotton lumps, 300x222cm
“Water is fine, and fire is fine. Does this mean both this and that are acceptable?”
The opening line of Jeong-A Bang’s artist note for her solo exhibition 《Water and Fire Alike》 reveals the artist’s gaze at life, found at the point where opposing properties collide and intermingle. It is not a gesture of simple inclusivity, but a critical question directed at the reality we face today.
The opening line of Jeong-A Bang’s artist note for her solo exhibition 《Water and Fire Alike》 reveals the artist’s gaze at life, found at the point where opposing properties collide and intermingle. It is not a gesture of simple inclusivity, but a critical question directed at the reality we face today.
나 지금 넘어간다, 2025, Acrylic Coloring on Hanbok fabric, 130.3×162.2cm
Issues such as power relations between nations, unjust social structures, women’s rights and human dignity, the climate crisis and environmental degradation, and nuclear power are deeply entangled with individual lives while simultaneously confronting us as irresolvable contradictions. In situations where no single choice is possible, how should we live, and what role can art play? 《Water and Fire Alike》 begins with this question.
일렁이던 너희, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 90.9×60.6cm
On Bang’s canvas, images that appear unrelated are strangely intertwined. A woman embracing a leopard-patterned bag while a leopard passes by outside the bus window; a blank face as doctor fish nibble at her toes; baskets filled with peaches and scallions—such incongruous objects and beings coexist within the same frame, meeting each other in estrangement. The artist focuses on the human attitude of holding together situations and things as opposite as “water and fire,” enduring them to the end. Familiar landscapes fractured by subtle fissures, and scenes that embrace the heterogeneous, expose the tangled emotions and social tensions of daily life. They become metaphors for the contradictions layered throughout our existence—life and death, power and vulnerability, nature and humanity.
손톱달님, 2025, Acrylic Coloring on cotton lumps, 340x240cm
Alongside paintings on canvas, this exhibition also presents Bang’s experimental works. Large-scale pieces made from dismantled cotton quilt linings, and works painted on traditional hanbokfabric, transform personal memory and material layers into new surfaces. These works extend Bang’s longstanding realist perspective and social critique, while proposing another possibility for painting beyond the conventional rectangular frame.
Ultimately, 《Water and Fire Alike》 illuminates our condition in a world that forces choices upon us, where we nevertheless feel compelled to “do something.” To embrace both water and fire, conflict and contradiction alike, is to reveal the uneasy reality of coexistence. Here, art becomes a question that cuts through a fragmented and chaotic world. Jeong-A Bang’s work invites viewers to weave together these scattered fragments and to reflect anew on their own lives and society.
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[GALLERIES] GALLERY MAC
- Dates
- 2025. 9. 20 – 11. 1
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