Ginok Song: In Her Eyes
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Weeping Summer -
Weeping Fall -
Adrift -
Horizon -
Picnic -
Long Run -
Excursion -
Tight Rope -
Her Strength -
Day Dream -
Returning -
Foot Hills -
Moon Light -
Night Harbour -
Eastern Point -
Red on Ocean -
Hope Holding -
Harbour Glow 1 -
Harbour Glow 2 -
Foggy Day
Christina Parker Gallery is pleased to announce In Her Eyes, an exhibition of new paintings by Ginok Song. The exhibition will open with an artist reception on Sep. 23 from 6–8pm, and will continue until Nov. 5. Music at the opening reception will be provided by Boyd Chubbs.
“I explore a woman’s gaze of the world, of herself and of the relations between, and I do this in terms of the social and psychological aspects in representational paintings. As a Korean-Canadian woman artist, I recognize that I was once saturated with the cultural values of Korean culture’s homogenizing patriarchy and a Eurocentric art education. Now, in my work and in my life, I have been undertaking an ongoing process of individual modernization. I find agency through my painting practice, where I can overcome the shadows of colonization and patriarchal paradigms.
In my In Her Eyes series, women are the subjects themselves, who represent their thoughts and experiences from their own points of view. Inspired by courageous women, I express the embodied perspectives and experiences of how women choose to move, explore and live in Newfoundland and Labrador. This itinerary is filled with hopeful, mysterious and terrifying life moments. The journey of becoming oneself in Newfoundland involves life challenges in encountering the new environment with all of one’s past memories. Boats and vehicles don’t simply enable a woman to move, they can also amplify her experiences and reveal how home appears when she is at the helm.
I use opportunities to construct the self in transnational culture through the land I currently belong to. My effort is to continue the process of rupturing the wall between self and other. I express my othered self and I recognize my otherness as a subject by using a metaphorical self to travel through spaces and reconcile memories of the past and the present. Ultimately, I want to develop the possibilities of how I can represent my experience as ‘the other’, and my ongoing struggle to become “I”.”
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 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.