Suzanne Song

Born in 1974, Suzanne Song is a Korean American artist whose work engages with the conditions of space, perception, and the structural logic of painting. Working primarily with geometrically abstract canvases, she develops a restrained visual language grounded in line, tonal gradation, and the subtle modulation of surface, through which the boundaries between pictorial space and physical presence are continually negotiated.

After studying painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, Song established a rigorous, process-based practice that combines careful preliminary studies with a highly controlled execution. Her compositions are constructed through precise measurement, masking, and the application of thin washes of color, resulting in surfaces that register minute variations in light and depth. Drawing on both Eastern and Western visual traditions, her work reflects a sustained inquiry into the historical and perceptual frameworks that shape the experience of space.

Across her practice, Song reconsiders the legacy of Minimalism and Op art, adopting their formal vocabularies (grids, repetition, and geometric reduction) while subtly displacing their emphasis on neutrality and optical autonomy. Her paintings often appear to fold, bend, or expand, generating a dynamic interplay between stability and disorientation. These perceptual effects, produced through shifts in line direction and color, activate what the artist describes as a “tension between belief and perception,” inviting the viewer into a continual process of visual recalibration.

Song lives and works in New York. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at institutions and galleries including White Cube, London; Gallery Baton, Seoul; Doosan Gallery, New York; and The Drawing Center, New York.