This week we welcome SuRan Song (pronounced “sue-ron”), an award-winning NYC-based multidisciplinary artist and collagist who has been performing and exhibiting her work since 1993.
With her performance art rock band, she has toured the country extensively and released four full-length studio albums. Her music has charted on the CMJ Charts, and with her band, she has performed live on air at radio stations across America including WBAI, WFMU, KQED, KPFA and KEXP.
Her solo exhibitions and performance work include Chashama Windows Project, The Laundromat Project and Site:Brooklyn.
Group exhibitions and performances include Katonah Museum of Art, The Galleries at Kean University, Ruth Foster Art Gallery, Rowayton Arts Center, Villa Terrace Museum of Decorative Arts, Cape Cod Museum of Art, Fabio Scalia Art Space, Art in Odd Places, Queens Museum, Queens Art Intervention and Jack Tilton Gallery in a performance art series curated by Janine Antoni.
SuRan moved to New York City in 1991 after receiving her BFA in Sculpture from the University of The Arts in Philadelphia. She then earned her MFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design while working at Pat Hearn Gallery and Andrea Rosen Gallery, interning with Eleanor Heartney, teaching studio art at Trinity Preparatory School, and serving as a ceramicist and mold maker at Peter Max Studios. She lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, before moving to Riverdale in the Bronx to be near family.
She is an ongoing student of Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, horticultural interpretation and math in alternative bases. Her late father, a gay Korean immigrant, mathematician, and librarian, fostered her interest in the unnatural order of things, and her Greek mother, a pianist and government documents librarian, gave her the love of music and civics.
Her father’s papers, which offer keen insight into the Korean diaspora, were placed posthumously into a collection held with the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University, and online at http://amdavis.org/Song-Family/.
“The Ends of My Mind 3311 (εἰδότα φῶτα 3311)”; Acrylic paint, marker on paper. 23″ x 17.5″
“Ancient Greek, horticultural interpretation, Sanskrit, the civics of politics, punk rock, math in alternative bases, and blockchain technology are all strong influences on my work. I am interested in manifesting philoxenia into forms that are not possible in conventional modes of conditioned perceptions and intentions. My work involves researching methodologies for art and sound to interface form and soul with matter and capacity toward that start,” she writes.
“I am also inspired by my routine practice of mantra meditation, which serves as a primary medium in my creative process, as another artist might use paint or the brush. My work encompasses painting, installation, melodic punk pop music, soundtrack, photography, sculpture, video, and performance art. I am interested in engaging with the public by making experiential art that transcends the viewer. Working in a multitude of disciplines further allows me to continually test the boundaries of the senses and the embrace of the breath, core elements that inform my artistic path.”
See more of SuRan’s work on her website
