Yun Ju Song's recent works can generally be divided into two images series: an image series of symbolic pictures and an image series of hexagrams from the I Ching. The image series of symbolic pictures features works such as Gyeongan Park, Dolma Park, and Workplace. These paintings form maps of the artist's favorite parks and the green spaces around her workplace. The objects in the spaces are not represented by true pictures, but rather with simple graphic representations. The bird's-eye view offers an image made up of simple representations of objects (such as trees), systematically filling an area, as if they had been sown and planted. It is simultaneously a visual image and a series of elaborate letters. The artist has depicted detailed objects, such as buildings, bridges, bodies of water, various kinds of trees, and other structures that fill a specific place that she is familiar with. She tried to express her emotions when she went for a walk there, her remembrances and misremembrances and of the day, her becoming one with nature, and the traces of "reification" that have begun to fade. The philosopher Zhang Zhao referred to the artistic meeting of the subjective and the objective as "reification." The end result of Song's work is a picture formed from a mixture of amusing, meaningful symbols and endearing pictograms.

“Parks, gardens, and natural spaces are all around me in my life. It is easy to forget that sky and earth, water and fire, mountains and ponds, thunderstorms and winds are always present beyond the concrete, unless you turn to face them. These paintings are gifts that I have received from the natural world as a reward for turning and approaching it.” (artist's note)

The image series of hexagrams consists of the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, which are depicted one at a time. In total, there are sixty-four hexagrams, ranging from "heaven" to "not yet complete." Song fills a wall with sixty-four images of identical size, showing bold geometric lines filled with dark ink along with thin, precise circles of various colors. This creates an overall image that is in accordance with the meaning of all sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching.

Song forms a sturdy, smooth, and transparent surface on Jang-gi paper (a traditional Korean paper) with dozens of layers of clam white paint. Chinese characters (pictographic characters) and other symbols are used to form a landscape. Shapes such as pictograms, the eight trigrams, symbols, and other representational iconography grow like a grass in an open field. The beauty of the shapes built in an intangible space without restrictions becomes a landscape. The white backdrop provides a rich feeling of blankness that shines subtlety, and its smooth, sensitive characteristics also feel tactile. The base of the painting becomes a shape in and of itself. Within the painting, over top of the black, painted lines, colorful circles or series of symbols are sensibly and smoothly integrated. The overall expression of the symbols is a geometric pattern. It is as sophisticated and precise as if it were printed. Occasionally, some areas are crumpled or faded by sandpaper. The scratch marks imply the passage of time, a slight fluctuation, a trace of extinction, a distortion, or a disappearance. In addition, circular images of the sixty-four hexagrams are repeatedly overlapped or swirled. The composition also suggests the momentum and movement of yin and yang.

Song's recent work depicts the natural scenery that the artist lived near and experienced through the use of Chinese characters and a series of symbols. After changing and repurposing small seal script calligraphy into something resembling an image, she arranges it in a space to construct a landscape using straight and curved lines. The paintings use archaic nuance to reincarnate the Chinese characters as contemporary abstract paintings or unique munjado (pictorial ideographs). Through ideograph paintings that combine, pictographs, the sixty-four hexagrams, and the yin and yang symbol, she visualizes the specific natural spaces that she has personally experienced. Her paintings reminded me of Ungno Lee's I Ching: 64 Hexagrams, a work in his Abstract Letter series, in which Lee expresses each transformation of the I Ching via the shape of the human body. Song's work is also reminiscent of Yun Young Pak's Pictogram Landscape.

Traditionally, the enjoyment of Asian landscape painting lies in the joy of recalling scenes that are held in nature's memory. Instead of objectively reproducing visual impressions, Asian landscape painting captures the psychological impression that the landscape had on the artist and preserves the memory of that impression. Therefore, what is important in painting landscapes is not the reproduction of physical characteristics but the reproduction of the experience of those characteristics. Everything in existence is in a process of endless change, and attempting to keep up with that change, the line of the artist is the greatest tool. The line is not merely a physical representation, but a psychological representation. So, traditional Asian landscape painting can only be deciphered through a psychological or intellectual lens rather than an objective one. Because the image is completed psychologically through mental effort, the object depicted in a given painting must correspond to a kind of symbol. Yun Ju Song’s paintings follow the traditions of Asian paintings in in their way of seeing and expressing nature. She uses the lines of the hexagrams to depict the flow of the time, the flow of ideas, and the flow of her consciousness. Song overcomes the obstacles of endless changes!

In traditional Asian painting, the external shape of a figure or a person is depicted, and the figure is said to be reborn in the work. But the point of drawing a picture is just to convey the "spirit" beyond the form. "Spirit" refers to the psychological connotations inherent in the image, the intrinsic understanding of the factors and the essence of life and movement. However, since "spirit" exists beyond form, it is necessary for artists to learn how to recognize and express it. Expressing the spiritual elements inherent in objects in a work of art requires "spiritual transmission" techniques. Song’s painting has its own anxieties about how to express the essence or thought beyond the natural phenomenon that she has seen and experienced. If one is in the field of traditional Asian painting, can one be free from such troubles and pursuits?

Song expresses nature with a goal similar to that of traditional Asian landscape painting. In addition, she presents pictures that bring in other elements such as the I Ching's logical understanding of natural phenomena, the flow of time and the line of a single stroke, the theory that painting transmits spirit, and the idea that calligraphy and painting share the same origin. (The I Ching is the birth of calligraphy and establishes that the trigrams are the root of all things and the origin of all things. Since painting and writing are both comprised of symbols, this theory states that they are of the same origin and are essentially the same thing.) In the end, Song attempts to recall that sky and earth, water and fire, mountains and ponds, thunderstorms and winds are always present beyond the concrete. This attempt requires her to transform landscape painting in a new way.