SOLO EXHIBITION
< Garden Whispers >
- www.galleryjones.com / @galleryjones
- Exhibition Date: May 1 – May 31, 2025
- Exhibition Review: (English / Korean)
Gallery Jones is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Mira Song.
As a young child, Mira Song—an artist who splits her time between Vancouver, Canada and Seoul, South Korea—spent hours among her mother’s carefully manicured bonzai trees. She would imagine herself miniaturized, sitting on a bench beneath the branches of a tree whose growth had been managed with reverence. These early imaginings are the foundation of a creative life that challenges aspects of space, rewards deep-looking and takes a comprehensive approach to the experience of art.
The unbounded meets the ordered in Song’s interpretation of the natural world. The relationship to nature in a densely populated urban environment in Asia is quite different from the full-frontal assault that the Canadian wilderness can present, sometimes just beyond the city limits. Aspects of space are the tool used to reign in the teeming organic matter within her canvases. Song plays with scale, and subtle compositional choices allude to a sense of the viewer looking at the paintings as if looking into a museum diorama or at an architectural model. The imagination is activated and in that moment the images of fern fronds and potted plants slip from the real to the surreal.
This is the act of deep-looking that Song is pointing us toward, where absorbing the art is not so much an intellectual exercise as an emotional and psychological one. In several Asian languages, the notion of “rest” is expressed with a combination “stopping”, “deep breathing”, “tree”, “human”, “leaning” and other expressions of physicality. The mind / body dichotomy is broken down in the experience of nature as it is in the experience of Song’s paintings. Like lying on your back under a tree and looking up through the foliage, so the painting’s layers serve to both provide exciting details and a place for the mind to rest.
