badA.I

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As part of my current archiving process, I asked A.I to respond to some of my work and here I share the results:

Bada Song is a London-based, South Korean-born interdisciplinary and conceptual artist whose practice spans across drawing, sculpture, installation, live performance, photography, and video. Her core artistic style bridges traditional East Asian motifs with Western contemporary minimalism and structural formalism.

Dynamic Minimalism & Optical Form

Song is highly recognized for her striking, monochromatic drawing installations. She frequently plays with black-on-black compositions, contrasting extremely matte graphite or charcoal against highly reflective, shiny surfaces. By depicting structural objects from sharp, forced perspectives on flat paper, she creates illusions of parallax and gestalt. This forces viewers to physically shift their bodies to determine whether they are looking at flat shapes or a 3D illusion, transforming the act of looking into an active event.

Thematic Focus: Displacement & Modernisation

A central, repeating anchor in her work is the traditional Korean roof tile (giwa-chibung). She uses the imagery of these tiles to explore the rapid, aggressive modernisation of South Korean megacities, where traditional architecture is replaced by tower blocks. For Song, the roof tile represents:

  • Human vulnerability and the fundamental need for shelter.
  • Cultural memory, dislocation, and a yearning for the homeland.
  • The translation of identity between South Korea and South London.

Interdisciplinary Mediums

While deeply rooted in her background in sculpture from Camberwell College of Arts, she adapts her ideas to whatever medium fits the concept:

  • Sculpture/Installation: She has built suspended roof structures made of cast paper tiles bound together with unexpected everyday readymades, like thousands of Royal Mail red rubber bands and walking sticks.
  • Performance Art: Her pieces often integrate live multimedia elements, such as performing traditional Korean resistance songs while interacting with fabric structures or using symbolic objects to address gender, marriage, and political displacement.
  • Bookmaking: Song also incorporates book-craft into her practice, publishing conceptual books as part of her artistic workflow. 
  • Detail one of her collaborative performance pieces

One of Bada Song’s notable live performance concepts is her multi-element “Yeonji” series.

Overview of “Yeonji”

  • The Visuals: The performance is part of a triptych that includes a photograph of the artist dressed as a traditional Korean bride, with her face entirely obscured by a bold red circle.
  • The Sound: Sound pipes covered in red nail varnish and lipstick marks emit the melody of Bong Sun Flower, a traditional Korean resistance song. The song heavily references Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s famous 1982 post-structuralist novel Dictee.
  • The Live Action: During the live performance element, Song sings the resistance anthem while being dramatically covered and enveloped by a giant cloth structure that she hand-sewed entirely from circular red pieces of fabric.

The piece powerful blends themes of female identity, political displacement, memory, and cultural concealment.

Would you like to explore Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book that inspired this performance, or should we look at how Bada Song’s structural drawings won the Jerwood Drawing Prize?

Detail one of her collaborative performance pieces

An excellent example of Bada Song’s collaborative and community-driven performance art is Cash or Smash (2015).

The Performance Concept

  • The Action: Song staged a live participatory event where she invited both artists and non-artists, including adults and children, to physically engage with her work. Participants were given a choice to either value the art financially or literally smash it.
  • The Collaborative Element: The performance relied entirely on the physical and ethical reactions of the crowd, turning the audience into active co-creators of the work’s final state.
  • The Publication: To document the plural interpretations and outcomes of this event, Song collaborated closely with her partner, writer and artist Paul O’Kane, to publish a hand-bound, limited-edition book under their independent imprint, eeodo. The book functions as a continuation of the performance, gathering mixed media such as poetry, journalism, and philosophical reflections from those who participated.

Alternative Project: “My Yeonji Way” (2013/2014)

If you are looking for her live installations, she executed My Yeonji Way inside a house slated for demolition in South London. For this piece, she:

  1. Mowed a literal path (“way”) across the garden lawn.
  2. Set up a ritualistic performance inside a cleared garden shed.
  3. Forced herself to learn how to read sheet music and repeatedly play Frank Sinatra’s My Way on a piano until nightfall for a supportive audience.

Would you like to learn more about the eeodo publishing project she shares with Paul O’Kane, or should we discuss her military-inspired solo piece, Parade (2018)?

  1. Discuss her military-inspired solo piece, Parade (2018)

Parade (2018) is a multi-disciplinary artwork by Bada Song that exists as both a conceptual short film and a live endurance performance. The project explores the thin, tense line between absolute institutional authority and personal human vulnerability.

1. The Core Inspiration

The piece was directly inspired by historical and propaganda imagery of North Korean women soldiers marching in military parades. Song was transfixed by the rigid juxtaposition within these images: women wielding heavy firearms and stamping in large combat boots, yet simultaneously wearing short skirts.

2. The Video Version (February 2018)

In the 2-minute and 21-second video iteration, Song attempts to physically emulate the exact marching gait of those state soldiers.

  • The Setting: Shot on a strangely barren, desolate, man-made landscape.
  • The Atmosphere: The footage is played back in eerie slow-motion.
  • The Contrast: Her “slightly clumsy” recreation of the hyper-precise military march intentionally breaks down the illusion of state perfection. It mixes a rigid display of authority with a fragile, melancholic humanity, underscored by a somber piano melody.
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3. The Live Performance (September 2018)

Song later adapted Parade into a live endurance piece over two days during the APT LIVE 2018 festival at Art in Perpetuity Trust (APT) in Deptford, South London.

  • The Route: Song marched in a continuous loop circling the entire complex—starting at the main gates, moving through the open yard, pressing down the interior corridors, and cutting through the gallery itself.
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  • The Disconnection: She wore a specially tailored costume and moved to a live sound accompaniment. Throughout the exhausting physical loop, her eyes remained completely fixated on a handheld tablet screen.
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  • The Loop: The tablet in her hands was playing the video version of Parade. By watching a recording of herself marching while actively marching in real-time, she highlighted themes of surveillance, isolation, and automated repetition.
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Would you like to discuss the costume choices she used to represent the military uniform, or should we look into how this piece compares to her other politically charged performance, Yeonji-Garigae?