Ginok Song: I Reach Home, I Am Serene

The Rooms | October 12, 2024 – January 19, 2025

Reviewed by Rhea Rollman

“Leisure is more than just a luxury – it’s an assertion of self,” writes curator Mireille Eagan, in the introduction to Ginok Song’s exhibition I Reach Home – I Am Serene (showing at The Rooms until January 19). Assertion is the key term here, and one of the joys of Song’s work is witnessing the subjects of her paintings as they claim their own sense of agency.

In the paintings of Ginok Song, it’s the gaze of her subjects that speaks volumes. There’s much to admire in her work – richly detailed vistas of forest and mountain; a fearless use of bright, spirit-invigorating colour — but it’s the gaze of her subjects, all women, which grabs the viewer and lingers in the mind. Whether their gaze is averted – avoiding the viewer with a casual insouciance, dissolving the spectator into irrelevance – or staring us head-on, Song is adept at conveying an immensity of meaning in that single interactive element: the moment of interface between her paintings’ subjects and the viewer.

It’s fitting that one of the items in the exhibit is a 9-minute short film (directed by Stacy Gardner) called “The Gaze,” in which Song reflects on her life and work.

Painting was originally a means of dealing with unresolved rage and childhood trauma, she explains in the film. Now residing in Petty Harbour, she grew up in Busan, South Korea.

“I wasn’t myself when I was younger. I didn’t have agency, because I was oppressed by father-figure,” she explains in the film. “I became a painter to express myself.”

“When I’m painting, I’m not looking at the male gaze. It is important to describe women’s representation, women’s perspective. Women’s bodies are not an object.”

The lack of male gaze in these works – and the complexity of women’s gaze – is one of their most striking elements. In “Into the Woods” two women walk together into a forest. Their backs are to the viewer, but the slight inclination of a head signals they’re talking together, gaze focused on each other and their shared path forward. In several of the pieces women are engaging with each other – looking at a harbour, conversing, playing hide-and-seek in the woods – their gaze steadfastly averted from the viewer, absorbed in each other’s presence and their shared tasks. In the beautiful “Heading Home” one woman lies in the lap of another, who’s holding a book. Are they looking into each other’s eyes? Or into the book and the sky above? Both at once perhaps. But the viewer is irrelevant.

There’s a subtle defiance in these pieces. Not only is there no male gaze, but the protagonists also refuse to be objectified by the spectator’s gaze. They’re absorbed in their own worlds.

Except when they’re not. In her early work, the women she depicted were depressed, Song explains in The Gaze. “But now there’s a slight change – it’s women who are looking for possibilities and positive outcomes. Women can choose and women can explore in life.

“I’m claiming back that sense of what was mine. It’s not stolen. I’m claiming it back.”

Thus begin a sequence of paintings where women face the viewer. “An Invite – Picnic in Time” appears to evoke a memory: on one side of the canvas, two young women picnicking together, absorbed in each other’s presence; on the other, a single woman carries her picnic bag into the forest, observing the first scene but also looking at the viewer. This single woman invites the viewer in with a confident gaze, sharing the scene – a memory of a younger self? “I’m claiming it back,” Song reminds us.

In “Presentation” the subject faces the viewer as well, holding a basket of food. But the head is held high, the gaze unperturbed and self-composed, eyes facing the viewer head-on. It’s in these subtleties of pose and expression that agency is expressed, and Song is a master at conveying power and agency through these subtlest of strokes. It’s truly remarkable how the slightest angle of the eyes or inclination of the head can suggest a sense of power held or withheld. Likewise in “Poise”: under a gorgeous cascade of yellow blooms a woman faces the viewer at a ¾ angle, head turned back toward the viewer while her body leans toward the flowers. So much is expressed in this pose: the glance she throws back over her shoulder is almost incidental, and while her eyes lock with  the viewer the mysterious smile and lifted eyebrows, coupled with the angle of her body, suggest she’s absorbed in her own thoughts, not in the opinion of the audience.

“The painting practice I’m pursuing now is mostly making it visible from invisible,” says Song in Gardner’s short film. She describes a mural she painted for her town of Petty Harbour-Maddox Cove which features women fishery workers.

“I painted this mural realizing that we all know everybody works hard in the fishing industry, and we see pictures of fishermen fishing and working really hard. We didn’t see pictures of women working represented. They were really working hard in those times, and mostly invisible. So making the women’s work visible was really important to me.”

Song refers to her unique style as Atlantic magical realism – “moody and mysterious, yet searching for something meaningful.” She says it’s an apt description of Newfoundland, and of a woman in this place. It’s an important reminder too that the oppressive patriarchal figures that shaped much of Song’s early work – and against which she paints – exist here in NL just as much as the South Korea she grew up in.