Hyun-Sook Song grew up in a mountain village in The Republic of Korea before travelling to West Germany in the early 1970s, where she began to draw and paint. Ever since, she has created a body of work with only a handful of motifs, reminiscent of her beloved motherland: clay pots, silk ribbons draped around sticks, and woven textiles. Hyun-Sook Song's presence of light and movement through and around the objects lends the canvases a powerful, nostalgic evocation; each painting references the ephemeral nature of the objects in the artist's memory, as well as the broader ever-changing perception of memory.

Hyun-Sook Song developed a very distinctive style and technique that blends elements from West and East. She uses tempera, a type of paint made by mixing pigments with egg yolk. This technique was widely used in Western painting in the Middle Ages, notably because of the paint’s opaque character. Hyun-Sook Song, by contrast, uses tempera in a way that is almost transparent. Her brushstrokes are economical but accurate; each stroke represents a single movement and there is no room for doubt. The titles of her paintings usually refer to the number of brushstrokes she needed to finish the work.

Hyun-Sook Song artistic output has been heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and calligraphy but also by her love of nature, the body and materials. Hyun-Sook Song paints while standing upright, with the canvas on the floor, and the creation of each work is itself a physical performance. Balancing on a wooden plank placed above stretched canvas, Song exacts the control and release of her brushstrokes with intense meditation and measured breathing; each calligraphic stroke records one unique motion. At the same time, the sober balance of abstraction and figuration in Hyun-Sook Song’s works relate to the history of minimalist and conceptualist painting, in which reduced, repetitive actions make space for endless variation.