Exaggerative sign
'Passing onto someone after taking an inkling of': is an answer to the ambiguous boundary or the certain point in space between lines that her work portrays. Her works are full of grass green at one moment, but reveals a very lively animal-likeness the next. If a definition is required, a new materiality, neither a plant nor an animal, is her own linguistic tool that the artist Myung-Jin Song has created.
Bertolt Brecht's 'the alienation effect (Verfremdung)' doesn't have to be applied to Myung-Jin Song's landscape for a viewer to wonder: It soon becomes an awkward highway he passes by every day or an outskirt of a mountain he is somehow familiar with. That's not boosted from the deliberate alienation process, but rather from the power of reading between the lines, and what she reads between the lines is of course a question of relationship. 'Natural' and 'man-made', 'abstract' and 'representational', 'two dimensional' and 'three dimensional', 'pause' and movement'... Where his glance lie is re-created such certain moment of hidden meanings of common materiality or surroundings gazed or observed by her selective zest. But exaggerated figurative language that the created materiality used independently or with tinkles is not a representation or reconstruction, but an implication of the advent of 'something' new.
In other words the subject matter that Myung-Jin Song chooses for her art is the universal landscape that the triviality of everyday life portrays, which is not easy to be re-cognized or re-interpreted just by differentiating the means of expression due to the simplicity of patterning the thought process. She rather decides to keep a certain distance from her subject matters in order to create works that are something themselves, something that acts independently on itself as if it stands on its own. Furthermore, without asking the true nature of that 'something' or posing the doubt for existence, she speaks of that very thing that can somehow be called 'the subtle inkling' that exists but is understood differently or presented differently.
Myung-Jin Song's works, breaking the structure of a typical way (the notorious dichotomy of this if not that) and suggesting another spectrum, are so susceptive and sensitive, devoid of brush marks, that they are often mistaken for computer generated graphics. Rather she sticks to the basics of painting and thousands of her brush strokes all over the 3m canvas quietly speak of arduous labor. This type of work becomes a wonderful device that helps us feel the overwhelming density when confronted by Myung-Jin Song's paintings.
Equipped with an excellent artistic view and an appropriate technique, her works properly presented make us forget our previous encounters with grass, a field or nature. Again we are welcomed by this 'sign', neither an animal nor a plant, maybe a shadow of some other existence or the thing she first took an inkling of.
By KimchoiEun-young / Gail Art Museum, Curator
