This glossy, translucent piece is one of the most illustrative works of the Water series in showing Ahn's meticulous layering of paint. Pushing and pulling strokes over and over, adding and subtracting paint, each piece is worked extensively despite the simple and harmonious appearance. This physicality is especially evident here because the paint has been given just enough transparency that thicker and thinner layers—varying only fractions of a millimeter—become noticeably lighter or darker within this lush crimson tone.

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.