Ginok Song – Fragments

Christina Parker Gallery is pleased to announce, Fragments, an exhibition of oil paintings on canvas with painter Ginok Song. This is Ginok’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens July 18^th, with an opening reception on Thursday, July 18^th from 5:30 – 8:00 pm.

Longing in artwork.
Which aims at the reality of the non-existent,
Takes the form of remembrance.

– Theodor W. Adorno

Ginok Song’s new series Fragments creates a body of figurative painting that explores a woman’s memories of diaspora.

I want to examine visually a woman’s psychological state, one that recollects memory fragments of detachment and difference. In my work, I investigate the experience of visualizing a woman’s memory. My research material starts with autobiographical memories of difference and detachment. My process involves what the autoethnographic thinker Tami Spry called “unsettling the I” (Autoethnography and the Other: Unsettling Power through Utopian Performatives, Routledge, 2016). Here, Spry’s unsettling is a process of critically investigating the self, recognizing and accepting the loss of an old identity, and coming to terms with the way that loss becomes part of the actualization of a new cultural identity. Life’s moments and situations are ever so familiar yet unfamiliar in my present life, where I experience the difference of my own existence: the fact that I exist, continually, as a Korean-Canadian woman. Bits and pieces of hidden experiences of women are made invisible and muted under certain social conventions, they can’t be accepted as real. They are unrecognizable. In Fragments, traces of pain and trauma are represented, such that my paintings are alternative encounters with “reality” in order to make women’s experiences visible within the otherwise masculine tradition in art. The creation of paintings from these fragments manifests individual efforts of narrowing the distance and the difference between a woman and society and remembering the patterns of diaspora that bring her where she is.

Ginok Song is a Korean-Canadian visual artist. She grew up in the city of Pusan, South Korea.

Song was determined that she would pursue her interest in fine art professionally and in 1992 she entered Pusan National University. In 1998 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in painting. After meeting the love of her life, Ginok moved to St. John’s, NL in 2000 and settled in Petty Harbour and since that time she has continued to make art and exhibit her work.

Ginok’s aesthetic influences include Atlantic Realism, a form of magic realism, with a focus on representations of women’s ways of seeing. Women’s experiences and their perspectives on the world are the concerns that captivate Ginok. In order to bring the reality of these experiences into the visual, Ginok turned to the representational style that allowed her to represent that which happens beyond the gendered confines of realist convention. Women’s self-knowledge and various forms of womanhood continued to deeply concern Ginok, leading her to further explore the limits and the possibilities of women’s representation. To that end, she pursued a Masters of Philosophy in Humanities at Memorial University and in 2017 she was awarded her degree. Notions of identity, gender ambiguity and difference have remained strong themes in her paintings.

Work by Ginok Song can be found in the collection of The Rooms Provincial Art Bank and in numerous private collections throughout Canada, UK, and South Korea.