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 grounds of Oriental painting. This ground is consistently expressed through the white surfaces of Yunju Song’s paintings. 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 meticulously crafts the ground itself. This exploration of the ground and the color white became the central focus of her first four solo exhibitions, all titled So (素), through which she examined not only the materiality of the ground but also the relationship between ground and form.

Beginning with her fifth solo exhibition, Feast of Characters (文字宴) (2009), Yunju Song incorporated pictographs as visual units, adopted a distinctive approach of representing nature, cities, and constellations through symbolic images in Character Landscape Painting (2011), and subsequently incorporated hexagrams (卦) and hexagram images (卦象) from the I Ching as motifs after The World Through Images (以象世界) (2015). The use of pictographs and hexagram images as the source of her visuals is a way to invoke into the present the archetypal imagery system that existed before the differentiation of images, signs, and characters as explained in her PhD Dissertation at the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University, Expression of Life-World through Images of Hexagrams and Pictographs. Furthermore, Song employs archetypal symbolic images as her primary visual language to express the contemporary society while newly activating within her practice the ancient system of meaning that understood forms as capable of revealing the essence of life and the world.

Across the canvas, Yunju 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 the recent 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.