Lot 1101: SONG HYUNSOOK

SONG HYUNSOOK
(Born in 1952)
5 Brushstrokes & 12 Brushstrokes on 2 Brushstrokes
Tempera on canvas
40 x 30 cm.(15 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.) & 150 x 200 cm. (59 x 78 3/4 in.)
Painted in 2004 & 2007 (2)

Seoul, Korea, Hakgojae, Breath and Brushstroke, 27 October - 9 November, 2006.

The canvas surface is the only color field in her paintings, as the figures are always composed of a few, distinct strokes. Hyun Sook Song counts the brushstrokes and entitles each of her paintings with the number of strokes needed to complete it. Every line reveals the process of its own production.

"All the great narratives", wrote Hyun Sook Song in 1994, in "which the people of the world anchor their lives, were taken from me long ago. Homeland, mother tongue, religion and custom have long since parted from my everyday life, raised from the living to art. I have been thrown back upon my self. This self is what is condemned to silence in us all, and yet is understood across all cultural boundaries." This personal experience of deterritorialization, decontextualization and the silencing of her own existence is a genuinely modern phenomenon and well documented in comparable statements in the writings of many artists. The setting of the post identifies a place. Hyun Sook Song's brush marks are not brushstrokes in the strictest sense of the word but brush tracks, since the acting of setting the brush on the canvas, the direction in which paint is applied and finally the completion of the stroke and the lifting of thebrush from the canvas are all readily traceable in the painting. Although this seemingly gestural and spontaneous painting style is emphatically physical (contingent), it is nevertheless precisely calculated (conceptual) as well. With her paintbrush, Hyun Sook Song establishes boundaries of place and time which the individual viewer perceives in his own way. Her paintings is not suitable for mass visual consumption.

-Roman Kurzmeyer (Art Critic)