HYUN-SOOK SONG

Song traveled to West Germany in 1972 as a guest worker with plans to return after a few years of paid labor as a nurse. She kept diary entries and wrote letters home during this time, developing a visual-symbolic language in the process: calligraphic signs expanded to express her experience of western modernity as well as her deeply felt social isolation. Song’s art-making provided a means to fashion a home space that was now primarily in her memory, since the small rice-farming village where she was born also experienced the transformations of modernity in her absence.

Rather than return to Korea, Song completed her studies in art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, where she evolved a unique mark-making technique using tempera paint—a blend of egg and pigment linked to the traditions of western medieval art. While tempera was commonly employed for its opacity, Song’s broad, sweeping brushstrokes are semi-transparent and applied with seemingly impossible economy. Often with only four or five strokes (her paintings’ titles record the total number), a fully formed object materializes across the picture plane as if from thin air.

Song paints while standing upright, with the canvas on the floor, and the creation of each work is itself a physical performance. Balancing on a wooden plank placed above stretched canvas, Song exacts the control and release of her brushstrokes with intense meditation and measured breathing; each calligraphic stroke records one unique motion and documents the artist’s inner state of mind, thus locating her firmly in the Post-Dansaekhwa movement. At the same time, the sober balance of abstraction and figuration in Song’s works relate to the history of minimalist and conceptualist painting, in which reduced, repetitive actions make space for endless variation.

For many of Song’s Korean artist contemporaries, the influence of western imagery and materials marked a departure from traditional eastern or Korean motifs; yet these remain the primary subjects of Song’s works. In terms of East and West, Song’s work is a production of both and neither—the expression of an artist living and working first and foremost in a domain of her own creation.

Courtesy Sprüth Magers