Phillip Barcio
Look to the Sea: The Water Paintings of Young-Il Ahn
Beauty and love—elusive concepts essential to human joy. How do we give them form? How do we attract them to ourselves?
Young-Il Ahn looks to the sea. He emulates its methods and manifests its lessons in his Water paintings, which he has been making for more than 30 years.
Ahn has said, “If I didn’t paint, I would not have known love and sensitivity for beauty, which have long enriched and broadened my life.”
Reading his words, I wonder if I might also find passage towards love and beauty through his work.
What are the methods of the sea? Time. Patience. Acquiescence to the forces of reality. What are its lessons? The sea has taught Ahn that although circumstances change, nature does not change; it cannot change. Nature is defined by its essential qualities, which are known to us through instinct and science.
The repetition, the patience, the perpetuity of the sea—these are the irrefutable strategies Ahn employs in his studio. What his work articulates can be summed up simply: relationships.
As Ishmael points out in Moby-Dick, as he pursues his own negotiation with the sea, “there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”
Ahn’s Water paintings remind us we are in a relationship with nature, in so far as we allow ourselves to be.
What other wisdom do they convey? Their cryptic titles—CLYB-17, CLYG-17, ELMB-17, BCPB-17—hold coded messages of hue and time. Behold the monochromatic pink, impasto canvas on the cover of this magazine, titled BLBP-17. The longer you gaze at its fluctuating brew of magenta and rose, the more secrets are revealed: hints of orange, yellow, and green; under layers of blue and white. The painterly ridges declare their relationship with the flattened valleys from which they rise. Particles of light elucidate their heights, casting innumerable shadows below. Are these waves? What lurks beneath their veil?
These paintings are not kinetic, but nevertheless they seem to evolve before our eyes. What is ethereal about them connects with what is temporary about us. Our perception changes, like the sea.
This is only art, not life. Young-Il Ahn’s Water paintings are not precious in the same way water is precious. They manifest its principles and processes. They express its essential qualities. They are built objects, corporeal reminders that we are part of the natural world. They are not magical. Whatever metaphysical power they might have is stored within their potential to convince us to
look more closely and think more deeply.
Young-Il Ahn has found his way to beauty and love. His Water paintings are invitations to turn, as he has, to the simple lessons of the sea. When we cannot seem to give form to beauty, nor attract love to ourselves, we can consider these lessons. We can share them with each other, and engage with the shifting tides, ridges, valleys, and multitudinous layers of whatever relationships emerge as a result.
Young-Il Ahn was born in 1934, in Gaeseong, Korea. He earned his BFA from Seoul National University in 1958. In 1966, Ahn moved permanently to the U.S., settling first in New York, and soon afterward moving to Los Angeles, where he still lives and works today. The process Ahn has developed to create his intricate, large- scale, meticulous Water paintings is associated with Dansaekhwa, an aesthetic position specific to Korea, which tends toward a monochromatic palette. As a Korean-born painter working in the U.S., Ahn is unique among Dansaekhwa artists. His work is currently on view through June 2018 in Unexpected Light: Works by Young-Il Ahn, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It has also recently been exhibited in two major monographic exhibitions: Young-Il Ahn: When Sky Meets Water (2017-18), and Young-Il Ahn: A Memoir of Water, both at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 2015. Ahn’s work has appeared in the New York Armory Show, Art Basel Hong Kong, the Art Busan International Art Fair, and the Korea International Art Fair. Paintings by Ahn are included in many prominent collections, including those of LACMA, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
