Song E Yoon: Songs Across Time

Presented by The Foundation of ART NYC and curated by Seohyun Kang, “Songs Across Time” brings together works by Song E Yoon and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to explore how human beings have recorded memory, meaning, and knowledge across millennia. The exhibition traces a line from prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs – understood not as decoration but as early systems of communication – through the invention of writing, to contemporary artistic practice.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, born in Côte d’Ivoire, spent his life documenting the oral traditions of his community and developed the Bété Alphabet: a system of pictographic symbols conceived as a tool to preserve collective memory and transmit it to future generations. Song E Yoon’s paintings and installations draw on ancient human markings — petroglyphs, astronomical symbols, mythological figures — recomposing them as large-scale environments where layers of time overlap. A recurring reference is the North Star, historically used by navigators and nomads as a fixed point of orientation; for Song, it becomes a symbol of humanity’s enduring search for direction.

Shown together, the two bodies of work function as complementary approaches to the same question: how do cultures record what matters, and what survives across time? Bouabré’s alphabet preserves memory in codified symbolic form; Song’s installations reactivate ancient visual languages through mark-making, light, and space.