Hyun-Sook Song was born during the Korean War in the southern part of the country, which was occupied by American troops. Growing up on her parents’ farm, integrated into an intact village and family community, she experienced life as a unity of people, nature and religion. When she came to West Germany in the early 1970s to work as a nursing assistant, she found herself confronted with a civilisation marked by alienation and exclusion. In order to come to terms with the rupture in her own identity, she began to draw and eventually took up the study of painting.

In her paintings, Hyun-Sook Song combines Western painting with Asian pictorial tradition. She turns to oil painting, which is favoured in European art, but follows her own cultural standards in her conception of the image. Symbolic abstraction and narrative figuration combine in a surprising way to form a new painterly unity. On a monochrome background, the painter applies individual, broad, uninterrupted brushstrokes that can be read as symbols and refer to the same motifs: a pair of shoes, a house and a temple, bamboo sticks, fire and a rice pot, a knotted cloth – objects rooted in everyday Korean life that are also important utensils in the shamanistic ritual of cleansing the soul.”

Curator: Andrea Hofmann