Sanghee Song (b. 1970) has been dedicated to summoning the "nameless beings" forgotten within the power structures of a society riddled with contradictions—marked by disaster, terrorism, and war. Based on meticulous research, the artist constructs multilayered narratives expressed through various media, including music, video, drawing, text, and performance.
 
Through this approach, Song has become known for her work that uncovers and brings to light the traces and histories of these invisible beings, reviving them in evocative and sensory forms.

Sanghee Song’s work in the 2000s reimagines the oppressed images of women within a male-dominated society, using performance and photography to bring to the surface the overlooked women and their tragic histories.
 
For instance, Dongducheon (2005) is a photographic work that captures the artist standing in the heart of Dongducheon’s red-light district in Gyeonggi Province, her eyes and mouth covered with black tape. Once an ordinary town, Dongducheon underwent a drastic transformation following the Korean War as it became home to a U.S. military base, altering its environment and living conditions. In the U.S. military camp towns, the government encouraged prostitution for American soldiers, leading to the oppression and exploitation of women.
 
In Dongducheon, the artist embodies one of the women from the U.S. military camp town, forced into isolation as a social underdog by enforced silence, thus crafting a subversive gaze on this overlooked history.

Song has also explored the tragedies of reality by weaving them with fictional narratives, such as folktales or myths, to bring hidden issues to light. A representative work in this vein is her animated piece, The Sixteenth Book of Metamorphoses (2008), which interlaces the themes of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses with contemporary stories.
 
As a continuation of the original 15 books of Metamorphoses, The Sixteenth Book of Metamorphoses depicts a love story among beings that self-generated at the dawn of time—humanoid creatures called "Khora," a dinosaur named "Plesiosaurus," and a "Leviathan," the ancestor of whales. However, as humanity’s greed for oil resources intensifies, the ecosystem is gradually destroyed, ending with a foreboding warning that hints at a revenge against humankind.
 
Connecting her own myth to real events, Song links The Sixteenth Book of Metamorphoses to her video work The Road to Mohang, which draws on the real-life tragedy of the December 2007 Samsung Heavy Industries oil spill. This linkage transforms the myth of ecological destruction by human greed into a present-day tragedy, making the fictional devastation of the ecosystem an urgent reflection on reality.

Sanghee Song’s work, which merges human tragedies like environmental destruction, extinction, and war with fictional narratives, evolved in the 2010s into complex installations that incorporate text, music, video, and drawings. These elements are intricately layered based on carefully researched and collected historical records.
 
In The Story of Byeongangsoe 2015: In Search of Humanity (2015), for instance, the artist visited sites marked by historical tragedies, projecting drawings of prisoners of war, massacre and disaster victims, and comfort women. These projected images are interwoven with unsettling text fragments sourced from various novels, adding a haunting narrative dimension to the video and drawing elements of the installation.

In essence, The Story of Byeongangsoe 2015: In Search of Humanity is a multifaceted work that assuages and commemorates the countless nameless victims filtered out in the process of historicizing tragedies within contradictory social structures. Rather than beautifying their tragedies, Song reveals them in a raw, unfiltered state.
 
To achieve this, she resists summarizing or tidily arranging the lives of those marginalized by history, instead scattering fragments of their suffering throughout the work. She intersperses text fragments from The Story of Byeongangsoe —a tale filled with crude and lewd content—as a device to underscore this raw exposure. As a result, her work feels deeply layered yet imposes an intuitive discomfort on viewers, engaging them persistently with the unvarnished truth of these forgotten lives.

In 2017, Song was awarded the “Korea Artist Prize” for her work that calls upon nameless beings by drawing on universally relatable folktale structures. In the exhibition, she presented two major works—Come Back Alive Baby and This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper—situated across a vast, empty 20-meter space.
 
The first piece, Come Back Alive Baby, is a three-channel video installation inspired by the tragic folktale of the “baby commander” (Agijangsu). It explores themes of apocalypse and salvation, weaving together elements of end times and the energy of new creation. Within each of the three channels, infant figures follow the tale’s structure, undergoing cycles of birth, death, and resurrection. The story in the video blends fragments from real-life tragedies in human history, including the People's Revolution Party Incident and Nazi’s racial crossbreeding experiments.

For this work, Song personally visited sites of some of history’s worst tragedies, such as Chernobyl, capturing them through her own lens. Amidst locations marked by devastation, she focused on the surprisingly beautiful landscapes reclaiming these spaces and the gradual return of peaceful daily life. This sense of resilience also emerges in texts within the work, which highlight hope even in the midst of tragedy.

Meanwhile, This is the Way the World Ends Not with a Bang but a Whimper consists of a tiled wall adorned with drawings of explosions from various times and locations and audio recordings of greetings in 55 languages. The work’s main material, tile, appears today as a familiar interior decor element, yet it was historically used to line the walls and beds of laboratories for human experimentation or torture chambers. This historical fact is also evident in the imagery of Come Back Alive Baby, projected opposite.
 
The drawings on the tiles depict scenes of brutal violence spanning from World War II to ISIS airstrikes. Arranged like a fragmented mosaic, the illustrations blend into one another in random configurations. The blue pixelated images, stripped of their original forms, do not immediately reveal their horrifying subjects; only on closer inspection do the true nature and grim realities behind the historical scenes come into focus.

The greetings emanating from the tiled wall are sounds generated by Google Translate, reciting ordinary greetings included on the Golden Record of the Voyager spacecraft, launched into space in 1977. Originally created to convey humanity's message to extraterrestrial life, the recording took on a deeper significance as a testament to humanity, given the looming threat of nuclear war at the time.
 
By positioning the viewer between the two works, the artist highlights that the realities of catastrophe, such as war, still exist in our world, while also awakening our dulled rationality regarding the violence surrounding us.

In her recent work Talk to You (2021), Song poses the question of whether we can coexist despite the countless scars left by history, including war and genocide. This piece features a structure alternating between a multi-screen divided into 16 sections and a single screen, using six drone speakers. The images on the screens depict landscapes from regions marked by historical trauma that the artist has personally visited.
 
Song gathered fragments of ordinary life from places where indiscriminate terrorism occurred, conflicts arose, and significant events like the Gwangju democratic uprising took place.

Through her work, the artist presents the images of those who cannot live, objects, landscapes, and the relationship between individuals and the state, prompting reflections on the existence of "you" and "me," as well as the nature of our wounds. The diverse scenes from various sources are combined in the artwork, creating landscapes that seem to resonate with one another, connected by shared experiences.
 
These landscapes are further enriched by text excerpts from John Berger's To the Wedding. Much like the characters in the novel who engage in conversations about love, hatred, hope, and despair with strangers, the speakers in her multi-screen installation and the drone speakers continue this dialogue of existence.

In this way, Sanghee Song has revealed the contradictions of human society through her unique narrative structures utilizing various media. In her works, historical tragedies from different times and sources exist as individual subjects while simultaneously forming new relationships within the narrative framework she reconstructs.
 
In other words, each historical event does not get neatly organized or connected; instead, it exists raw and unrefined, engaging in a dialogue with one another. This approach does not present a sanitized version of history; rather, it reveals the realities of history, resurrecting those who have disappeared or been forgotten and sharing their stories.

Sanghee Song graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Ewha Womans University and received her master's degree from the same graduate school. The artist has held solo exhibitions at various institutions, including the Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2022), VZL Contemporary Art (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2018), Witzenhausen Gallery (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2010), Insa Art Space (Seoul, 2004), and Art Space Pool (Seoul, 2001). She has also participated in group exhibitions organized by various international institutions in China, the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands.
 
Additionally, her works have been screened at the 2010 Seoul International Women's Film Festival, the Taiwan Women's Film Festival “Women Make Waves,” and the Berlinale Forum & Forum Expanded in 2018. She received the Hermès Foundation Missulsang in 2008 and the Korea Artist Prize from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in 2017.

References

• 서울시립미술관, [SeMA 소장품] 동두천, 2005, 송상희 (Seoul Museum of Art, [SeMA Collection] Dongducheon, 2005, Sanghee Song)
• 올해의 작가상, 송상희 (Korea Artist Prize, Sanghee Song)
• 아뜰리에 에르메스, 제9회 에르메스 재단 미술상 전시 (Atelier Hermès, 9th Hermès Foundation Missulsang)
• 아트스페이스풀, 변강쇠歌 2015: 사람을 찾아서 (Art Space Pool, The Story of Byeongangsoe 2015: In Search of Humanity)
• 서울시립미술관, 자연스러운 인간 (Seoul Museum of Art, Homo Natura)