This piece was featured in Young-Il Ahn’s solo retrospective at LACMA in 2017, a landmark exhibition for both Ahn’s career and the museum itself. Unexpected Light: Works by Young-Il Ahn was the first solo exhibition in LACMA’s history for a Korean-American artist, a long overdue milestone given the long history of Korean-American culture in Los Angeles.

The dynamic surface of the piece was frequently used in this era of his artistic output, the translucent but glossy oil paint simultaneously reflecting light and letting it pass through to lower layers, which in turn bounce light back out through the paint. This effect makes the painting especially active visually, glowing both from within and glimmering on the surface. The complex palette—bringing together complementary opposites in red-tones and green-tones—has a dynamic energy balancing on an edge between harmony and discord.

This painting belongs to Young-Il Ahn's Water Series. For more than 30 years, Ahn has been attempting to capture the sea’s illusive, shimmering color and light in his paintings. The series grew out of a formative experience Ahn had in 1983, when he was lost at sea aboard a small fishing boat off the coast of Santa Monica. For a time, he was caught in fog so dense that he could not even see his own hands. When the fog cleared, sunlight illuminated the surface of the ocean surrounding Ahn for miles in every direction, leaving him with an indelible visual and emotional impression, which he has strived for decades to express in his Water paintings. In 2017, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) acquired part of this series and presented 10 of the works in the exhibition Unexpected Light: Works by Young Il Ahn, the first solo exhibition of a Korean American artist at LACMA.