Hyeseung Song

HYESEUNG SONG is the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in July 2024. She is an American representational painter best known for large-scale figurative oil paintings and prints whose visual idioms toggle between resolution and fragmentation. Her work explores creativity, psychological incipience, and the life of the artist.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Song grew up in Texas and studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities. In her mid-twenties, she returned to her childhood passion of art, leaving academia to pursue painting at the Water Street Atelier, now the Grand Central Atelier, in New York City. After completing her studies in 2008, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (again in 2011) and began to exhibit in New York.

Song is a devoted teacher and has instructed at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Queens Council on the Arts’ High School 2 Art School Program as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, during which time she was named among Baltimore Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for her work creating synergies between the science and art communities in that city. She often addresses high school and college audiences, and was a featured speaker at Princeton University at its TedX Conference in 2016 as well as at the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton’s Leadership Conference in 2021.

She has received residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Brittany, France, Penland School of Arts and Craft, the Vermont Studio Center as well as others, and her work resides in private collections internationally.

Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.