Hyun-Sook Song’s first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin features both new and older large-scale paintings that give a comprehensive insight into her artistic oeuvre.

Though reduced in terms of coloring and formal vocabulary, the variations are endless. The works can be viewed from both an abstract-meditative and a figurative-symbolic perspective. Yet Song’s paintings do not depict objects, and their titling further underscores the absence of a narrative—they are rather an expression of Song’s memory of certain objects. The artist’s painting technique translates it into brushstrokes that evoke associations with recurring forms from her homeland.

The characteristic style and expressive quality of a brushstroke have been considered a constitutive element of Korean art for many hundreds of years. Each brushstroke in Song’s work marks a unique, intuitive movement that documents the artist’s state of mind at a given point in time—an aspect that locates her work in the post-Dansaekhwa movement.

Song came to West Germany in 1972 with the intention of moving back to Korea after a few years of work. Instead she studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, where she developed a unique technique using tempera paint (a mixture of egg and colored pigment) that draws on the traditions of Western medieval art. Though she has lived in Germany for fifty years, Song’s artistic approach is firmly rooted in Korean calligraphy and influenced by her relationship to nature and the body. In this way her work can be seen as both a product of the East and the West or a blend of neither; more than anything, it reflects an artist immersed in a world of her own making.

The movement of a brushstroke, from its first contact with the canvas to when it lifts away, is executed without interruption or revision; while a single brushstroke demands the highest levels of concentration and calculation on the one hand, so does its release at just the right moment. The paramount importance of the brushstroke in Song’s art also comes through in the titles of her paintings, which usually indicate the number of movements she needed to complete the work.