Hyunsook Song

Song Hyun-Sook was born in Jeollanamdo, Korea and spent her childhood on the mountain village of Mu-Worli in the province of Damyang. Song had been dispatched to Germany in 1970s to serve as a nurse. After the four-year service, she entered College of Fine Arts in Hamburg and has actively started her new career as an artist. Song conveys the emotion of ‘longing’ through her paintings. The hometown, unfamiliarity in the foreign land, sorrow and conflict, sociality and the afterimage of zeitgeist are filled within the canvas. Her subject matters are rooted in the traditional past of her native Korea and many are of vernacular nature: a ceramic jug, the corner of a house, rustic raw silk. She harmonizes antithetical elements by using European tempera and canvas and creating powerful brushstrokes with a Korean gwiyal brush. The artist’s brushstroke contains the strong energy of calligraphic skill in the tranquility. Her gestures are entirely conveyed in the brushstrokes. In contrast to the energetic brushstrokes, the images are settled down in serenity. And it releases the Korean natural beauty in infinite depth. In addition to her usual paintings, she has created a work that touches on the moment of personal significance, for her solo exhibition at the Hakgojae gallery in 2014. The artist was inspired by the Sewol-ferry disaster in 2014, in which 304 high school students and passengers perished, for Brushstrokes-Diagram . The deep black background expresses the spirits of the victims and disappearing Sewol-ferry in the dark desolation. This painting has been acquired by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Song’s works are a part of numerous collections including; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf, Germany; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and many more.