Sanghee Song graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Ewha Womans University and received her master's degree from the same graduate school. She currently lives and works in Korea.
Art
Space Pool is holding Sanghee Song’s solo exhibition 《The Story of Byeongangsoe 2015: In Search of the Others》 from November 12 to December 13. The artist has long worked to
excavate and bring to light traces of human barbarity that have been
marginalized and pushed to the edges of history. In this exhibition, she
connects these traces with Byeongangsoe-ga, a Korean
pansori-based novel full of raw vulgarity and tragedy.
The
video installation The Story of Byeongangsoe 2015: In Search of the
Others continuously presents images of figures abstractly summarized
in history, such as colonial subjects, prisoners of war, victims of massacres
and disasters, and comfort women. Amidst the rapid flow of images accompanied
by music from György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, hand-drawn portraits by the
artist drift across the screen. Through these images, the artist performs a
visual ritual of calling forth and invoking those who have vanished without
even leaving behind names, traveling to sites of mass civilian killings such as
caves and sugarcane fields in Okinawa.
In
addition, the work incorporates grotesque and eerie texts drawn from various
literary sources, including the pansori novel Byeongangsoe-ga, Choi In-hoon's
The Grey Man, and Kenji Miyazawa's The Restaurant of Many Orders.
Art
Space Pool stated, “This is a rare exhibition that does not speak in
euphemisms. Through the raw texts filled with vulgarity, tragedy, and fantasy,
Sanghee Song seeks to prevent the forgetting of those marginalized in history,
connecting their sorrows with these vivid narratives.”
