Artist Statement
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 Memory 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 Memory 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.