Ahn Jisan “Day, Night”

【About Ahn Jisan and His Works
The reality revealed through his works: confinement, oppression, chaos, fear, anxiety, and bodily sensations】

Ahn Jisan was born in Busan, South Korea in 1979. After graduating from the Korea National University of Arts in 2006, he studied painting at the Frank Mohr Institute in the Netherlands. From 2013, he spent two years in residence at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands. Following solo exhibitions in the Netherlands, he returned to Seoul in 2015 and began his artistic career in South Korea. His works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (South Korea), the Daegu Art Museum (South Korea), and the Royal Academy of Art (Netherlands) among others.

Ahn Jisan’s paintings evoke an atmosphere of anxiety marked by a sensation of confinement, oppression, chaos, and fear, while his exceptional knack for composition, dramatic use of light, and meticulous yet powerful brushwork come together as a strong enticement to the viewer’s gaze.

Ahn’s personal memories of running around and playing in the Bosu-dong bookstore district of Busan as a child, the gloomy atmosphere of his father’s studio, and scenes of torture in political dramas intermingle in sensations that seem to be shared by many people. The diverse range of images that he weaves together seem to unfold on the canvas as a world of infinite depth and profundity.

Is the world truth or fiction, real or virtual, substance or illusion? What kind of truth lies within the darkness that pierces through the inner self?

The sense of reality underlying the images revealed in Ahn’s works evokes a variety of new and mysterious emotions in the viewer, while also awakening memories buried in the unconscious — memories that feel as though we had previously encountered them somewhere.

Another distinctive feature of Ahn Jisan’s creative process is the way in which he plans everything meticulously in advance, sketching ideas that come to mind with a pencil and sometimes creating partial mockups of them in his studio. Also noteworthy is the fact that many of his paintings evolved out of photographic collage drawings.

Previously, Ahn sought to express his subject matter through the more direct approach of immersing himself in the act of smearing paint on his hands and feet, and washing it off repeatedly — a practice that stemmed from a certain desire for and skepticism over the forms of things that are fading, or have already vanished. Ahn had also studied the life and work of the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975), feeling a certain empathy towards works by Ader that depicted a state of perpetual falling and impending death, overlaying his own emotions and painterly annotations onto this existing video work by Ader.

The diverse range of Ahn’s preparatory processes represent an attempt to imbue the body with sensations often overlooked in two-dimensional art in a natural way, thereby broadening the range of sensations tied to the medium of painting.

A sense of anxiety eroded by circumstances lurks behind various objects, furtively revealing its presence. It is only when we confront this anxiety head-on that we can truly understand Ahn’s work.

*For more details on the artist, see https://www.jisanahn.com/

【About This Exhibition and Ahn’s New Works
Night / Day: The Ambiguity of the Subject】

On the occasion of this exhibition, Ahn provided the following statement.

Is the world we see truly real? Night and day constantly repeat and shift. We hope that you will take advantage of this valuable opportunity to discover new perspectives on everyday life.

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Night / Day — The Ambiguity of the Subject
Ahn Jisan

This exhibition stems from an interest in how we perceive objects, particularly the instability inherent in the very instant that we believe them to be clearly understood. While we may assume that the objects, landscapes, and faces of others before us are recognized as distinct forms, that sense of clarity is always a provisional one, in the context of our experience of perception. Familiar scenes become unfamiliar in an instant, objects that were once distinct become blurred, and the world we believed we were seeing manifests itself in a different way. What I seek to do in my practice is to explore such moments, when these kinds of lapses or failures of perception take shape as painterly scenes.

The recurring scenes of day and night that appear in my work do not merely represent temporal distinctions: they indicate different states of perception. The daytime landscape begins with the external world. Nature does not exist as a kind of stable backdrop. Rather, it appears as a scene where force and movement intersect. Trees are destroyed by strong winds, and the invisible force of the wind is visualized as the shape of clouds. Even under a clear sky, this scene is imbued with a certain tension, as if a typhoon were raging. The figures that appear at this moment stand with their hands covering their faces or their hats pulled down tightly. Their gestures appear to be both actions meant to withstand external forces, as well as acts to conceal their expressions. While these figures and the landscape certainly exist, they are not fully manifested, giving the impression of a scene in a state of constant flux.

The night scene, on the other hand, shifts from the external landscape to an interior space. Inside this cramped room are a chair and a painting hanging on the wall — the space is shrouded in darkness, as if the power had gone out. Here, the face does not appear as a single, complete form. It splits apart and turns into a number of distinct fragments that never converge to form a single gaze. If the daytime scene is a nod to the instability of the external world, the nocturnal one indicates the state of fragmentation that occurs within the perceiving subject.

This approach is connected to philosophical thought that understands perception not as a fixed relationship between the world and the subject, but rather a relational process that is formed through the body and various sensations. In particular, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty asserts that the world does not exist a priori as a collection of fully defined objects: rather, it is constantly being formed and transformed within the experience of perception. In the same way, my paintings do not seek to present fully defined objects. They are concerned with the act of revealing the boundaries of perception, where objects appear and disappear.

Ultimately, landscapes and figures, faces and spaces do not exist within these works as fixed forms. Rather, they are constantly being deconstructed and reconstituted in the context of their relationship to one another. Through my paintings, I seek to capture both that state just before an object takes on a certain clarity, as well as the state that exists in the wake of the collapse of that certainty.

In these situations, paintings function not as images that seek to explain the world, but as spaces of perception that clarify how we sense the world, over the course of a process where landscapes and faces, and objects and spaces, appear and disappear within each other’s boundaries.
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