Like a star-filled night sky, Young-Il Ahn’s Water SQBB 19A seems to glow with a transcendent inner light. Ahn’s signature impasto ridges add a sense of shade and depth to the surface, while a faint light blue horizon line draws the eye upward, suggesting this is more than an abstract field of colors and shapes.

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.

Artist Background:
Born in Gaeseong, Korea, in 1934, Young-Il Ahn earned his BFA from Seoul National University in 1958, and relocated to California in 1966. He is renowned for making intricate, large-scale paintings that explore his relationship with beauty, nature and music. His work is frequently associated with Dansaekhwa, an aesthetic position specific to Korea, which expresses natural processes through a mostly monochromatic palette. Originating in Korea in the 1970s, its name, which translates into English as “monochrome painting,” was coined by art critic Lee Yil to describe a trend he observed among artists such as Kim Tschang-yeul, Cho Yong-ik, Chung Sang-Hwa, Lee Dong Youb, Lee Ufan, Park Seobo, and others, towards non-objective, earth-tone paintings incorporating a limited range of hues.

Ahn’s reputation grew rapidly in South Korea following a series of exhibitions with the legendary Hyundai Art Gallery, including solo gallery exhibitions in 1982 and 1986, even before they would take on the name “Gallery Hyundai” in 1987. This era of explosive innovation in the Korean art world—Nam June Paik showing there in 1986, Lee Ufan in 1987, for example—remains undeniably relevant to this very day. Despite all this success, Ahn would remain relatively obscure in the United States until a series of retrospectives on dansaekhwa in the 2010s brought new context to his (and others) practice.

Although Ahn was already living and working in the US when Dansaekhwa emerged in Korea, his work eventually caught the attention to Dansaekhwa expert Yoon Jin Sup, who in 2015 curated Ahn into the exhibition Dansaekhwa II: The Traces of Four Artists. In a critical essay accompanying the exhibition, Yoon wrote, "Young-Il Ahn’s canvases are comprised of small, repeating square-shaped dabs of color. This repetitive feature of his work comes from the same artistic tradition of the first-generation Korean Dansaekhwa painters.”

Additional connections between Ahn and the first-generation Dansaekhwa artists of Korea include their mutual reliance on nature as inspiration, and their shared desire to escape the oppressive aesthetic expectations of the market by developing new styles and techniques. Ahn's work was exhibited several times at the renowned Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, which was instrumental in bringing the work of first-generation Dansaekhwa artists to acclaim.

Ahn had a well-deserved solo retrospective at LACMA in 2017. The exhibition also marked the first-ever solo exhibition at LACMA by a Korean-American artist, a milestone decades overdue, given Los Angeles’ long and rich history with Korean culture. Met with rave reviews and given an extension to its run due to popular demand, the exhibition stands as the most significant institutional representation of Ahn’s work to date.

Recent exhibitions of Ahn's work include the retrospective Young-Il Ahn, at Kavi Gupta gallery, Chicago, Illinois; Young-Il Ahn: When Sky Meets Water, at Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California; Unexpected Light: Works by Young-Il Ahn, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; and A Memoir of Water, Solo exhibition, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California.