Rooted in the symbolic systems of ancient China, Yunju Song’s painting practice forges itself through the formation of plain yet potent visual units, which may be termed ‘visual glyphs’. The period following her first solo exhibition, So (素) in 2002, was devoted to exploring the foundations of Oriental painting. Song began deploying pictographs as visual units in her fifth solo exhibition, Feast of Characters (文字宴), and later, the hexagrams (卦) and hexagram images (卦象) of the I Ching as motifs in works subsequent to The World Through Images (以象世界) (2015). The use of pictographs and hexagram images as the source of her visuals is intended to invoke into the present the archetypal imagery system that existed before the differentiation of images, signs, and characters. Furthermore, Song deploys archetypal symbolic images as her primary visual language, seeking to newly activate within her practice an ancient system of meaning that understood forms as capable of revealing the essence of life and the world.

Across the canvas, Song unfurls symbolic imagery that is simple in form yet richer in meaning than conventional pictorial representations, thereby constructing a microcosm of the world she both grasps and yearns for. In this solo exhibition, As If They Were Present [如在] (2025), she builds upon her accumulated symbolic imagery as the ground for her ‘ritualistic painting’, through which she articulates an integrated worldview that encompasses antiquity and modernity, life and death, and humanity and the cosmos. With an exhibition title drawn from a ritualistic proposition in The Analects, to treat the absent as if present, she performs a kind of ‘pictorial ritual’ by arranging across the canvas symbolic images excavated from antiquity. To invoke and bring into presence that which has spatiotemporally disappeared yet continues to operate; that which is unseen, yet undeniably real, Song presents the exhibition space as a massive altar under the premise of 'as if they were present.'

In this exhibition, Song takes as her subject matter the places, objects, nature, and cosmos related to ancestral rites, inviting into her painterly realm both the ancient world prior to the present life and the spirits (鬼神) that exist beyond death. Beginning with the centerpiece The Snake Goes to Eat the Turtle, and extending through series like The Scent of Pine, The Pond and the Sage, The Empty House, and Xiaoyao Pavilion (逍遙亭), Song reconstructs the central political and ritual sites inside the Fortress Wall of Seoul into cartographic forms. Meanwhile, Dedicated to the Xu Star (虛宿) depicts various ritual vessels used in the Royal Ancestral Ritual at Jongmyo Shrine in monochromatic orange, arranged in a line to transform the gallery wall into a ritual altar (祭床) set for an offering. The Big Dipper, which incorporates the Big Dipper (七星) talisman, along with Five Grains, which neatly arranges the sacred grains, symbolize the cosmos and nature invoked through the medium of ritual. Juxtaposing auspicious seal script (篆書), iconography of sacred animals, and decorative roof-end tiles (sumaksae), Hope embodies a state of tranquility that one longs to reach through ritual, just as its title implies.

Just as designating and solidifying a site by considering terrain and cardinal orientation served as the genesis for founding an ancient state, Song begins her pictorial ritual by depicting core locations of the Joseon capital. The cartographic paintings, led by The Snake Goes to Eat the Turtle, center on Deoksugung Palace, arranging key sites such as Sajikdan (Altar of Earth and Grain), Hwangudan (Altar of Heaven), the main spaces of Changdeokgung Palace, and Jongmyo Shrine in a site-plan layout. These works attest to how the urban planning principles of the Rites of Zhou (周禮), such as ‘Left Shrine, Right Altar’ (左廟右社), which positioned the Jongmyo Shrine and Sajikdan Altar on the left and right of the royal palace, were passed down into the Joseon Dynasty, visualizing an ancient worldview where state governance and rituals dedicated to heaven and earth were intimately intertwined.

Yunju Song views the spatial arrangement of the Joseon capital remaining in present-day Seoul as a direct continuation of the ancient world. It is natural, then, that her ‘diagrammatic paintings’ deploy symbolic images rooted in ancient scripts, such as pictographs, oracle bone script, and seal script. Her signature method of rendering nature, cities, and constellations through unique symbolic images, first fully introduced in her solo exhibition Character Landscape Painting (2011), is applied here to depict the capital, allowing both form and meaning to converge even more cohesively toward the ancient world her practice is oriented toward. Referring to this body of work as ‘diagrammatic paintings’ highlights how the artist prioritizes the arrangement and relational dynamic between the pavilions and trees on the canvas, rather than focusing on their individual forms.

In the diagrammatic paintings, architectural structures are painted in black ink, while natural elements are painted in orange. Grounded in an ancient dualistic worldview, this color scheme functions to distinguish between ‘phenomena’ that humans can sense and the unseen ‘energy’ made visible as if they were present. The round rings placed across the canvas are iconographic motifs the artist has employed since translating the hexagrams of the I Ching into visual form; in these diagrammatic paintings, they serve as devices to visualize the sacred atmosphere emanating from each location. By expressing these rings in the same orange hue as the trees, the artist reveals traditional view that connects nature with sanctity (神性). In the same vein, in A Radiant Day, the sacred tree shaped like the character ‘出’ (meaning 'to emerge'), believed to mediate between heaven and earth, is also rendered in orange.

The ground of Yunju Song's paintings is consistently rendered in white. Her white ground is not a purposeless white margin, rather filled entity. Attempting to literally embody the painterly proposition that ‘the application of colors comes after the preparation of the white ground’ (繪事後素), meaning painting is possible only after a white canvas is prepared, Song deliberately crafts the ground itself with meticulous care. In her first four solo exhibitions, taking the concept of ‘so’ (素) as her topic, which encompasses both the ground and the color white, she systematically explored not only the material property of the ground but also the relationship between the ground and form. In this exhibition, Song constructs the ground by layering white pigments such as oyster shell white and titanium white on top of traditional mulberry paper that has been sized multiple times with animal glue. Particularly in works dealing with the capital city and the Five Grains, where the layout and arrangement of forms are critical, she repeats the process of dividing the canvas by drawing square grids in ink and pencil and scraping the surface with sandpaper between applying white coats. The ground formed through this method appears as a physical layer with an irregular texture, as well as a ground surface engraved with a grid pattern. A ground thus constructed and partitioned closely resonates with the exhibition's overarching theme of revealing the accumulation of time and spatial status within a ritualistic context. For Yunju Song, creating the ground is no different from meticulously preparing an altar.

Dedicated to the Xu Star, which depicts Jongmyo Shrine ancestral ritual vessels in an uniform orange, can be viewed as the completion of setting the altar. ‘Xu’ in the title is one of the ancient Twenty-Eight Mansions (二十八宿), a northern constellation governed by the Black Tortoise (玄武) which is an intertwined figure of a snake and a turtle. Considering that Xu was regarded as a star presiding over death and ancestral rites, both the ritual vessels appearing in Dedicated to the Xu Star and the ritual space depicted in The Snake Goes to Eat the Turtle resonate with the artwork titles. As shown in The Big Dipper, which adopts traditional talismanic formats to render the northern constellation, long an object of veneration. As such, Yunju Song consistently develops her painterly rituals grounded in an ancient worldview.

Just as Sajikdan, where rituals are offered to Jiksin (稷神), is marked on the capital layout The Snake Goes to Eat the Turtle, and square bo (簠) and round gwe (簋) vessels appear in Dedicated to the Xu Star, Song is acutely aware of the central importance that grains held in ancient rituals. Thus, she presents the Five Grains (五行星) work alongside them. Five Grains was a work completed by evenly arranging various grain kernels, represented by the Five Grains, on top of a grid-drawn ground. Different grains such as rice, barley, oats, peas, and red beans are combined for each work, colored in white, yellow, red, blue, light green, black, and other hues depending on the grain type. From the stage of making the grid-patterned ground to drawing the outlines of nearly a thousand grain kernels per artwork in ink lines, and then meticulously filling their interiors, Yunju Song's process involves labor-intensive and performative devotion comparable to grain farming. It is as if the artist is offering to the world the Five Grains, long considered the source of human life, by painting them through the maximum labor she can bear. Having fulfilled her human duties through the ritual of painting, the artist assigns a title that connects the Five Grains to the Five Elements, which compose both the cosmos and the human realm. Neatly arranged Five Grains in Five Grains resemble constellations that have found their proper positions, bringing to a completion a microcosm wherein the order of heaven and earth is fully harmonized.

In Hope, the peaceful world that Song pursues unfolds in the format of a palace flower-patterned wall. Across the upper band of the wall, sixteen roof-end tile patterns are listed, and below them, iconography of the crane, dragon, qilin, and phoenix are set alongside seal-script characters reading ‘Longevity and Fortune’ (壽福), ‘Health and Peace’ (康寧), and ‘Eternal Happiness and Prosperity’ (永樂). In Hope, the ideal values that the artist seeks to realize through painterly ritual are formed within the floral patterns of the roof-end tiles, auspicious script, and sacred animal motifs. Combining painting, symbols, and scripts, Hope acts as a provisional answer for Yunju Song, who has long explored the source of visible forms to capture even the unseen upon her canvas.

As If They Were Present is an exhibition that depicts a world of peaceful times and prosperous harvest (時和年豐), a state where humans fulfill their duty in their respective places, allowing nature and spirits to cycle in harmony with humanity, ultimately restoring order and harmony. Yet, for secular humans alienated from the cosmos and nature, reaching a transcendent utopia from a life severed from death and a present disconnected from the past is virtually impossible. Despite this reality of absolute absence, the artist still gives form to the world through images (象), as if it were already there or about to arrive, that is, as if they were present. Looking back, was not depicting absent objects as if present the very origin of painting itself? The ancient era to which Song seeks to return through devoted ritual is the origin of artistic creation, where the essential was extracted from the visible and meaning was bestowed upon the unseen to generate paintings, symbols, and scripts. Beyond that, it represents a complete and holistic utopia where humans, spirits, cities, nature, and the cosmos circulate within a single unified sphere.