Sok Song

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My interdisciplinary practice examines migration, cultural inheritance, labor, militarization, and belonging through the ways histories become embedded in materials, objects, and bodies. Drawing from my experience as a Korean immigrant who grew up in U.S. military towns, I consider how personal and familial histories intersect with larger systems of national identity, assimilation, and displacement. I work across installation, sculpture, textiles, printmaking, book arts, ceramics, sound, and light. Rather than treating these as separate disciplines, I allow materials and processes to move between them. A garment can become a printing matrix, a print can become a textile or sculptural form, and a folded sheet can expand into a book, object, or installation. Folding, pressure, sewing, weaving, repetition, layering, and suspension recur throughout my work as methods for transforming familiar forms into something unstable or newly legible. Garments, military uniforms, camouflage, sewing patterns, hanji, organza, domestic objects, and found materials carry associations with labor, gender, nationality, and memory. I manipulate these materials through transfer, stitching, folding, printing, and construction, leaving traces of objects and bodies that are present through their absence. Transparency and layering allow images to overlap, disappear, and reappear as viewers move through the work. Book arts extend these concerns through sequence, touch, intimacy, and collaboration. My...

Artwork