Song Burnsoo, Korean Artist and Educator Who Bridged Printmaking and Spiritual Abstraction, Dies at 83
Song Burnsoo, the Korean artist whose career moved from postwar political printmaking to later works centered on rose thorns and shadow, died on June 15 at age 83. Gallery Baton announced his death on June 18.
Born in 1943 in Gongju, South Korea, Song studied at Hongik University in Seoul and remained closely tied to the school for decades. He taught there from 1980 to 2008 and later became professor emeritus. Beyond the classroom, he founded the Maga Art Museum in 1998 and served as director of the Daejeon Museum of Art, roles that placed him at the center of Korea’s postwar art infrastructure as well as its studio culture.
Song’s early practice was rooted in printmaking and the political atmosphere of postwar Korea. He later studied lithography in Paris, a period that helped expand his visual language toward more religiously inflected work. In those later pieces, the rose thorn and its shadow became recurring motifs, suggesting a practice that was at once tactile and contemplative, grounded in material process but open to metaphysical inquiry.
His work was included in the 2024 traveling exhibition “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s,” which toured the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. That exhibition placed Song within a generation of artists who helped define the experimental energy of Korean art in the 1960s and 1970s, even as his own career continued to evolve in later decades.
Gallery Baton said in a statement that Song “fundamentally expanded the language of Korean contemporary art.” The gallery added that his legacy lived not only in his artworks, but also in the artists he taught, the institutions he helped build, and the international horizons he opened for Korean art. He received the Order of National Service Merit in Korea in 2000.
Song’s death marks the loss of an artist whose influence was both visible and structural: in the works themselves, and in the institutions and students that carried his ideas forward.
