Harin Song

No I Could Never Fake It
heat pressed acrylic, yarn weaving and colored balsa
23 x 27.5 in.

Third Place Award

My work is about rearranging primary painting elements consisted of paint, canvas and stretcher bar. By changing the sequence, dominant order or arrangement of them, I initiate unfamiliarity. In this respect, my pieces go beyond a limited category having a painting, sculptural and textile aspect.

By pushing an acrylic paint tube directly to a surface or manipulating paint such as sewing or heat pressing, I’m embracing accidents so that my work has a lot of natural varieties of color and shape, which enable each chunk of paint to have an implicative story. The more I lose my control, the richer the painting is in a manner of a higher law of nature. There is the mixture of accidents and improvisations in my painting because I like the adventure of playing along the faint border between intuition and intention. Along this way, my painting teaches me how to embrace all the vicissitude in life. I was a compulsive perfectionist, which made me suffocated in the end. I realized that the obsession came from inside of me, not from objects or situations themselves. From that moment, I tried to accept unexpected things, and my painting’s helped me the most teaching me how to appreciate a natural diversity.

The process of attaching and detaching paint pieces or vice versa repetitively and laboriously is the reflection of my emotional status derived from adjusting to a new environment — nostalgia, desperation and longing. Personally, life is all about adapting from everyday moments to the enormous changes such as moving to another country. In fact, we all have been through an adjustment at least once in a lifetime, but it is amazing to see how differently people deal with it, so as with my work.

© Harin Song