Song studied painting and printing in the early 2000s at the Yale School of Art in Connecticut, USA, and credits her background in printmaking for the development of her layered approach and line-based compositions. Rendered with patience and exceptional precision, Song’s work often involves a trial of puzzling out a composition before anything. Sometimes, this includes the creation of studies by playing with the placement of shapes cut out of paper. At other times, Song may create a small, preparatory painting, or use the computer to study or adjust its proportions, or decide on the thickness of the lines or space in a margin. Upon finally turning to the linen canvas, Song meticulously measures and applies tape to its surface, and only then carefully and methodologically goes over the resulting sections with thin washes of colour. Drawing upon the flattened perspective of traditional Eastern painting, theatre and paper-folding arts, and the discovery of one-point perspective which transformed Western visual conventions, the techniques of Song’s process imbibe different art historical trajectories in relation to space and its expression.

Informed by theories of perception – which emerged concurrent to mid-20th century artistic movements such as Op(tical) art and Minimalism – Song’s work uses line, colour and basic, geometric units to build compositions that are illusionistic in nature. Areas of the canvas are animated by simple changes in the direction of line or a shift in hue and appear as if to cleave, contort or subdivide – a sensation of movement propagating a discovery, Song says, of the ‘tension between belief and perception’. In Op art – as much as in the Renaissance designs that long preceded it – trompe l’oeil was employed to demonstrate artistic mastery and challenge the verisimilitude of sight, both through the very ability of technique to deceive the eye. 

Essential to the success of trompe l’oeil is an understanding of the mutual constitution of light and depth, which is often managed and mediated by subtle tonal shifts and gradations. Check Fold I and Tesselle Fold (both 2025) apply this technique at scale; both paintings feature checkered gridwork that is torqued in its vertical run up and down the canvas, the ridge of these now-three-dimensional objects dictating the way shadows fall into the composition’s crevices. Subverting the well-known Minimalist motif of the grid – which is typically depicted flat, like a net diagram – these works of Song’s playfully redress the Minimalist principles of reduction and distillation that purport to bring viewers closer to the essence of a thing. Paintings such as Ply Fold and Counter Fold (both 2025) also possess traits and tenets of Minimalism, namely, their radical simplicity and preference for compositions structured according to the rule of the line. Song’s work, however, exploits a series of vertically stacked lines to different ends, by introducing degrees of change in colour. With lines angled inwards or outwards at various points, the resulting arrangement of forms suggests rustled pleats or bent window blinds, alternating between exposed surfaces that reflect light and shade trapped between the striations. Mirrored and inverted sequences such as these are deployed across Song’s work, visually oscillating, as the artist says, between ‘recognition and reinterpretation’.

Song’s paintings problematise simple, ready distinctions between what can be seen and what can be felt, and therefore, believed. Conditioned by the reciprocity between viewer and artwork, the paintings invoke Rudolf Arnheim’s application of Gestalt psychology to visual art, which explored how humans categorise and order seemingly innocuous shapes and lines to meaningfully perceive an entire image. Song’s awareness and activation of these stimuli – the way in which a line, form or tonal shift is able attract or draw vision along, and like this make intimations – likewise reveals that perception is grounded in interpretation and open to manipulation. Titles such as Traverse or Counter Fold (both 2025) are a nod to, and departure from, the austerity of the Minimalists, and make explicit reference to the dynamic motion and internal connection that distinguishes Song’s work.

Integral to Song’s artistic inquiry is how visual perception can be understood as a process that is not only cognitive, but emotional. Contra the alleged neutrality and inhibited expressivity of Minimalism, Song seeks to conjure depth, movement and feeling. Unlike her previous bodies of work – which used the restricted, neutral palette of whites and greys also favoured by the Minimalists – these new paintings explore a new subject and material entirely: colour. Folding Dawn (2025), for instance, features warping ribbing in soft, velvety rose, while the ‘Refraction’ works (2025) emanate an overall periwinkle hue through zig-zagging bands that ebb pink, into purple and light blue. Lunar Fold (2025) lends colour to feeling with its somnambulist, dove-grey complexion and articulated folds, which impart image to a natural cycle of transition. 

Read through a range of artistic techniques and influences, Song’s practice engages age-old painterly questions concerned with perception and the pliability of the image. Using twisting and pleating movements in her compositions to re-look at the total effect of an image, and its construction by light and colour, Song unsettles the artistic traditions that her work appears to cite. In her understanding of these layers not merely a formal device, but ‘a carrier of meaning’, Song furthers the geometric abstraction to include its emotional potential. At first a physical and psychical experience that traffics in illusion, Song’s work revels in the encounter of beauty, belief and uncertainty, to highlight ‘the impermanence of perception’.