Song Burnsoo (b. 1943) is a leading figure of Korean modernism and a formative member of the Korean avant-garde movement. Spanning over half a century, Song developed his trans-medium approach, contemplating existential themes through a deeply spiritual and formally innovative lens.****

The motif of ‘thorn’ is concretized gradually from the mid-1970 after his studying in Paris. Starting to describe roses with distinctive sharp thorns in prints, the thorn becomes the persona of Song as he deeply engaged in a spiritual reflection through the ups and downs of life. The thorn conceived in Christ’s crown of thorns gradually features into an iconographic metaphor of wars, social conflicts and exhaustion representing the irony of the harsh reality and the hope that exists in it. “The thorn has become both a religion and art as my life. After all, It is all about me.” This quote evidently presents the symbolism of the thorn in his artistic practice.

In recent years, extending every further on the symbolism given to the ‘thorn’, Song took a new approach on the value of thorn to reproduce individual units of planets, constellations, and their clusters as objects. Mesmerized by the night sky full of stars over his studio in the forest, the artist realizes that the expression of stars featured as “twinkle” is similar to the sharpness of the tip of a thorn in a clear shape. The primary-colored canvas, capturing stars that have flown in and emerged over the infinite time in a vast cosmic arena, gives a deep reflection as the master’s monologue who witnessed the wonders of the world in mind.

In 2017, MMCA held a large-scale retrospective exhibition 《Song Burnsoo_Pantomime of 50 Years》, which explored the artist’s major works from the 1970s onwards. He participated in 《Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s》, co-organized by the MMCA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and is currently traveling to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles until midst of May.

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