Solo Exhibition〈The Insignificant, The close observation〉Statement
Projectspace00 2022.10.4. - 10.23
In the firm weave of time and space, she takes a deep breath, reflecting on herself, the other, and the pulsating world that surrounds them all. Though she lives as if entrusted to the flow of time, she sometimes arrests it—contemplating her own body in relation to the outer world that overlaps with it. Loving and loathing the world at once, she gazes into what is deemed insignificant, listening to the intimate whispers of the other.
Jean Song recognizes herself as a member of society while observing the unnoticed or marginalized aspects that fall out of collective consciousness. In particular, she captures truths detached from social phenomena and translates them into a visual language. This solo exhibition 《The Insignificant, The Close Observation》 borrows the poetic aesthetics found in the poems of Kim Ki-taek to metaphorically describe the artist’s attitude of meticulous observation. The poet turns his attention to the trivial and the marginalized—such as insects or hunchbacks—discovering vitality embedded in marginal lives. Through “close observation” of the “insignificant,” he takes the side of things, inverting their meaning and existence. Likewise, Song carefully examines the insignificant, focusing on the underside of human society that constitutes her surroundings, and unfolds the neglected within the temporal field of ink painting. By persistently revealing hidden, unspoken truths on the surface, she sheds light on alternative patterns of life entangled among them.
Recently, with changes in her living environment, the artist has expanded her interest from communal consciousness among humans to the vitality and instinct pulsating within nature. As numerous plants were brought indoors only to quickly wither and be discarded, she illuminated the traces of life in beings diminished by human desire. Dried and broken plants, so fragile that they crumble at the slightest touch, nonetheless retain their original forms with resilience, sustaining a lifeless existence far longer than in their living moments. Projecting layered meanings onto these delicate, expired beings, she associates them with the peripheries of human existence, mourning them within the temporal dimension of ink.
Like a ritual honoring the spirits of the excluded, plants are darkened in ink, while gold and silver incense burners are placed before folding screens in commemoration. Unlike traditional six-panel folding screen paintings that conveyed moral teachings or wishes for longevity in weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites, Song’s screens are embroidered with charred brushstrokes depicting plants burning to ash. Conjuring media images of forest destruction and wildfires, she embraces the cycle of life that emerges from the ground, returns to it, and is reborn. In this exhibition, she also interprets the symbolic and formal significance of the ‘Sangnyunbu’, the crowning finial of stone pagodas. Positioned closest to the sky, the finial replicates the stūpa, which in Buddhism was a mound built to enshrine relics of the Buddha. At its highest point, the ‘Chalju’ (central pillar) upholds and stabilizes the structure. In this, the artist discerns a vision of life after boundaries of mortality. As life ends and is buried in the ground, reverence is sent upward, toward the farthest point from the earth, embodying the cycle of returning to soil after the sublime moment of life.
Moreover, she delicately engages with neglected facets of society and her own cultural identity. By combining the linear aesthetic of plant objects with the form of the pagoda finial, she develops an East Asian sense of dynamism. Contrasting with the mass-oriented character of European floral design, she expresses East Asia’s modest, line-based sculptural sensibility through wire and mounting techniques. The dynamic, drawing-like lines that spread across the surface represent her formal aesthetics, grounded in her cultural sphere. With rigor and persistence, she embraces regional cultural foundations while simultaneously sensing plural values.
Returning once again, we encounter stillness within the temporal field of ink. This arrested image-thought reflects the artist’s effort to return the intimate whispers of the other—filtered through her perception of phenomena and beings—back into society. The cyclical lives of plants, the earth, and the cultural nutrients that surround her form the supporting structure she relies upon and trusts. Like an identification with Mother Nature as the origin of creation, the solid social structures and communal bonds become both the motivation and the embrace of Song’s practice. Ultimately, by quietly gazing into the insignificant, she slows her breath and discovers herself in the space between.