Botanical Imagination and The Seearch for Lost Connections 

1 The Juniper tree has become Incense itself. 
The Juniper tree, which was so named for its fragrance, is now incense for evoking ghosts, and now for chasing away strange odor. Did that big and sturdy Juniper tree which stood guarding its village become an incense, communing with ghosts through memory of its past? It takes but a moment for incense to alight and fade, but the memory of that sturdy Juniper lives on. And Song, Soo-Young searches out that memory. It is her mission to search for the traces of that Juniper, from the incense which is now merely a Thing [of instrumental use]. Just as one sees the forest from pencils and books; from chopsticks springtime sprouts; from a leather jacket, a sheep. 

Every spot which has been hacked at by a plane - there is a pattern to be found. The cold and dark growth-rings which pass through warm and living tree-flesh These hard spots, too, are places where Winter has once passed.
…… <Tree by Kim, Ki-Taek>   

The remembrance of the natural origins of [industrially reformulated] Things in the work of Song, Soo-Young is neither a reminiscence of a utopian, “original,” state of things, nor a simplistic grief about the death of Nature which has become mere raw material. The common theme of her work is coming face to face with [a past] which an object possess of its own. Just as the poet sees in the growth-rings of trees in the corners of wooden furniture the aftermath of vicious battle against the “violence of Winter cold,” Song searches out the traces of trees and forests in everyday objects. For instance, this might take the form of a big, sturdy Juniper which has been transformed into a slender piece of incense. Through Song’s botanical imagination, a book relives its former existence as a forest; a sorghum broom as a reed warbler nest. Trees contain the oldest memory of the earth. Before human beings and even animals came to pass, trees took root, propagated themselves, and battled against intense winter cold. They remember the earth which they survived. And the memory of a time in which animals and human beings coexisted. Thus, to find that a giant forest, which remembers the epochs past, has become a single pencil, is to go back against the stream of earth’s memory.

2 This is not a delusion of grandeur.
<Tree from a Cedar Forest in California - Pencil> is a series of drawings that the artist made by using up an entire pencil. The act of using up an entire pencil--one way to use an everyday object to connect with a Californian forest--takes special tenacity. The act of inquiring individual pencil companies the origins of the pencil-trees, researching the species of the trees, and choosing the cedar-pencil to draw the scenery of a Californian forest is closer to an anthropological quest than to a performance relying on intuition or sensory perception. In other words, Song’s performance, which connects the object (the pencil) with its past (trees and forests), is not simply to be described in terms of artistic or poetic sensitivity.

Such vagueness and equivocation is a source of chaos [in the realm of physical information], but in Song’s work, this twofold nature of meaning is visualized in a form in which neither of the two coexisting components denies or represses the other. And in such a state, objects are not summoned as defendants charged with the destruction of nature. The two states are simply aligned and connected by a precarious device - the hyphen. In such a process, the artist minimizes her value-judgment and simply waits for the change in awareness taking place meanwhile. It is a place of possibilities.

The second supposition is related to the form of Song’s work. Song often begins her work from the association of images. (It’s a process that is often accidental and intuitive in nature, but let us not forget that this is only possible because of her sensitive gaze towards the mundane and the trivial.) The objects of such associations are chosen based on the similitude of form or of meaning; and the job of turning those associated images into physical form may seem very simple and even facile. However, making a microscopic scopes owl too small to grasp, turning stapler fragments into a vine climbing a wall, bending a brittle piece of incense, and sculpting a broccoli to visualize a city under nuclear reaction are all feats of craft and intensive labor which necessitate multiple trials and errors. Song’s work of giving physical form to image associations involves providing clues to the onlooker which make invisible things visible. This means making visible things which were invisible or remained invisible to us - things of which had hitherto been unspoken. Free from artifice and adornment, neither declarative nor imperative, speaking through her own language in an intuitive yet controlled form, her work reveals connections in such a way that they had been present in the objects all along - and this is the artistic virtue of Song, Soo-Young. In Song’s work, the forms exist clearly but not obtrusively, just enough to serve as clues to the associations and to keep each component from denying the other. This allows for the artist’s stream of thought to be revealed and for the spectators to come face-to -face with the old memories of earth and the lost connections among objects.

3 But perhaps her voices, devoid of neither praise nor blame, are in truth saying the following:

No one distinguishes life and food: The tottering walks and the gentle expressions, The greedy appetite and the peaceful ruminations Pile up on the container and the handcart, in no particular order They accumulate on the streets like fallen garbage Once you remove the shrieks and the squirm The strongest muscle here becomes grub. …….
<At slaughterhouse in Majang-dong by KIM, Ki-Taek>

by Hyun, Ji-yeon, Art Critic