3 Brushstrokes over 1 Brushstroke / 11 Brushstroke
Hyun-Sook Song
I also needed the foreign, the other, in order to become attentive at the highest level. How could I have ever dreamed of discovering the values I would like to know and see preserved in the useless things behind our house?
In her paintings, Hyun-Sook Song brings together a meditative practice that connects the universal with the individual. Song was born in a village in South Korea, where she grew up with rural traditions. After attending school in Gwangju, she decided to move to Germany as a migrant worker. Her visual language is a refined lexicon of her memories of Korea, experiences of loneliness and exclusion as a migrant and her inspirations from Eastern philosophies, calligraphy and nature. The simplicity of her brushstrokes encapsulates the complexity of a life marked by homesickness, art, tradition, and breaking free from frameworks imposed by others. A clear reference to her past life is the motif of the large ceramic pot. Such pots were used to store rice, kimchi and other foods. The object plays a role in several anecdotes from her childhood and her mother's pregnancy during the Korean War. The title of each work represents the number of brushstrokes she needed to paint. She achieves the interplay between opacity and transparency in her painterly language by mixing Western traditions and East Asian traditions.
2019 - 11 Brushstrokes, 105 x 75 cm, tempera on canvas
2023 - 3 Brushstrokes Over 1 Brushstroke, 60,5 x 75 cm, tempera on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Zeno X Gallery
Hyun-Sook Song
°1952 Damyang, Korea
Hyun-Sook Song was born in 1952 in Damyang, South Korea. She lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. She was represented by Zeno X Gallery from 2018 to 2023, where she received her first solo exhibition in Belgium in 2018. Her work is in the collections of Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf), Leeum-Samsung Museum of Modern Art (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, Gwangju Art Museum and Gyeonggi Museum of Art (Ansan). Her works have been shown in group exhibitions at, among others, The Drawing Center (New York), Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Deichtorhallen (Hamburg), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), California College of Arts (San Francisco) and Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf).