Song Burnsoo, whose decades-long investigation into textile, symbolism, and spiritual form made him one of the defining figures of Korean contemporary art, died on June 15th. He was 83. Gallery Baton, which represented him since 2019, announced his passing on June 18th.
Song was born in 1943 in Gongju, South Korea, and studied at Hongik University in Seoul, where he would return as a faculty member from 1980 to 2008 and later held the title of professor emeritus. He also founded the Maga Art Museum in 1998, dedicated to supporting artists working in fiber and textile crafts, and served as director of the Daejeon Museum of Art.
His early career centered on printmaking, with works that engaged directly with the sociopolitical landscape of postwar Korea, such as Consultation of General Rule about Unification of Korea (1972/2001), which addressed the division of the peninsula. Later, he moved to Paris to study lithography, where his works became increasingly religious in tone.
From this point onward he began using the motif of the rose thorn and its shadow, to stand in for the realities of human suffering in the context of religion. These pointed edges were often set against backgrounds of primary red or blue, as in the works for his 2023 show with Gallery Baton, “Know Yourself.” “The thorn has become both a religion and art as my life. After all, it is all about me,” he said in the materials for that exhibition.
Possibility 023-CV, CVI, CVII, 2023
Song Burnsoo
Gallery Baton
Song was included in the major 2024 traveling exhibition, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s,” which toured the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He received the Order of National Service Merit in Korea in 2000.
“Song Burnsoo belonged to a generation of artists who fundamentally expanded the language of Korean contemporary art,” Gallery Baton said in a statement. “Through more than five decades of experimentation across media, he developed a singular artistic vocabulary that moved fluidly between material, gesture, and philosophical inquiry. His legacy extends beyond his artworks themselves: it lives on through the generations of artists he taught, the institutions he helped build, and the expanded horizons he opened for Korean art internationally.”
