Hyun-Sook Song
Essay by Carsten Probst
Zeno X Books, Hannibal & Koenig Books, 2020
€29,95
This book gives an overview of the recent works of the South Korean artist Hyun-Sook Song (born 1952). In 1972 she travelled to West Germany and soon after that she began to draw and to paint. In doing so she often gave voice toher nostalgic memories of her beloved motherland. Over several decades she created paintings withonly a handful of motifs or themes: clay pots, silk ribbons draped around posts, or woven textiles hung on a thread.
Her artistic outlook has been heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and calligraphy but also by her love of nature, the body and her materials. She sees painting as a performative happening. She places the stretched canvas on the floor of her studio and balances above the painting on a simple wooden plank that is placed above it. In doing so she is in a state of utter concentration and meditation. The intensity of the painting enables her to work for only a few hours per day.
East Asian painters perceive the landscape very differently from Western artists. In the West, we are generally in the habit of seeing figurative painting as a window on the world and in a linear perspective, while artists in the East still see themselves as an integral part of this landscape. In the West, distinct brushstrokes are generally rendered invisible, while to East Asians the brushstroke is precisely the crucial and central element. A brushstroke is the ultimate proof of the painter’s inner peace (or turmoil) and is always expressive. In addition, the brushstroke is always unique because the relation with the surface, the scale and the light is always different. Further proof of the importance of the brushstroke in Song’s oeuvre is the fact that her titles are based on the number of movements that she needed to complete the work. Hyun-Sook Song’s works can be compared to haiku: short and simple but very powerful in terms of content. (source: Zeno X Gallery)
ISBN: 9789463887359
