The Brooklyn Rail

Young-Il Ahn (1934–2020) remains conspicuously absent from histories of contemporary art in Los Angeles, a city where he lived and worked for decades, and where—in 2017, fifty-one years after emigrating from Seoul—his solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art marked the first for a Korean-American artist at the museum. Now, Young-Il Ahn: Selected Works 1986–2019, a tight historical survey curated by Jennifer King, (re)acquaints viewers with the gorgeous “Water” paintings for which he is best known (not least because of their presence at LACMA, in that defining solo presentation and a Korean art exhibition that preceded it); it also introduces many early works that were not exhibited in his lifetime. Chief among the latter are pieces that similarly engage less with landscape as a genre than as a generative site for conjuring quasi-abstractions. In the vein of Piet Mondrian’s cruciform schema delineating the horizontals of ocean and the verticals of piers, Ahn took the sun-refracting, liquid horizon and made of it a number of works that attenuate geometry as form.

Untitled (Harbor) (ca. 1986) marks the beginning of this chronology. There, the harbor remains loosely intelligible at mid-composition, constituted of a basket-weave of gridded paint. The overall tones in white and gray suggest the cloaking of water in a dense marine layer, and with it something of the shifting Pacific meeting a mutable vanishing point. Ahn’s clustering of strokes at the painting’s center grasps at an organizing structure for docked boats and their near-kaleidoscopic reflections, one that extends edge-to-edge in Harbor-C (1998). By the time of Harbor-C, Ahn’s palette shifted to chartreuse and robin’s-egg blue, choices of hues that are comparably less referential than the local colors evident in the earlier effort. So, too, are the strokes—rectangular units, really blocks tightly built—more evidently the result of having been applied by a knife. Beyond the consolidation of technique, Harbor-C likewise shows Ahn’s progressive equivocation regarding the place of signification. As with a pair of works relating to horse racing, which similarly extrapolate from the decipherable subject into a far-from-legible rendition, the title captions the otherwise nonrepresentational assembly of colored shapes, which then come to appear as masts and sails. Or they don’t.

Beyond the framing work done by the titles, Ahn supplied life stories that served much the same function. In his autobiography, And still it flows towards me: A Life Lived with Art, Ahn narrates an origin:

In 1983, I had fallen into a deep depression. As was my habit at the time, I loaded a sketchbook and a fishing rod into a small motorboat near Santa Monica Beach and chugged off toward the horizon. … Not long after getting out to sea an ocean fog came out of nowhere and quickly grew so thick that I couldn’t even see a foot in front of me. … I lost all sense of direction.¹

Looking up after some indeterminate time, he discovered “an unimaginably open space rippling with waves sprinkled with sparkling lights,” and in this transformation experienced something of oneness with it, even as it existed at some ungraspable distance: “I became profoundly aware,” he writes, “of the surface of the sea being reborn in each and every moment.”² One feels such acuity of sensation in Ahn’s works from the 1980s on, even in those absent the thematic of water. An exploration of the performance of self emerges in other pieces from 1998: Tal-198 and TAL (mask) 298, both of which by turn disclose and conceal calligraphy and images of Korean masks (the “tal” of the title), within and amidst furrowed marks. By the early 2000s, he was calling other related works marked by forms of cultural and linguistic inscription “Self-Reflection.”

Yet it is in the “Water” works that Ahn’s phenomenological focus is most fully embodied. Presented in this context in a back room and hence seen only after encountering what he made before (and in many cases, alongside this series), they were revelations. It is a cliché of describing post-war LA art as that made in thrall to light and exploration of space, but that makes such an orientation no less true for Ahn as well. The “Water” paintings each try to conjure reflections and plays of color on the surface of water. Variations suggest ripples and times of day, or seasons, inflected by temperature and atmosphere. Water LLBG 16 (2016) looks like an overcast sky as much as the aquatic body that held it; Water SQGB 19 (2019) is a deep blue, maybe a nocturne or a registration of the deep. Palpable underpainting—turquoise beneath the almost lavender-grey of Water LLBG 16—below the textured grids of knife-applied tiles lends literal depth, and the conjunction allowed for endless permutation, which Ahn exploited until the end of his life. In a given painting, such perceptual instability makes the work a shimmering, seemingly changeable thing: a testament to flux and the impossibility of, but also desire for, apprehending it.