Young Il-Ahn, When Sky Meets Water: Long Beach Museum of Art | Long Beach, CA

This exhibition is the second show of Young-Il Ahn's work at the Long Beach Museum of Art. It honors the celebrated South Korean artist with a major thirty-five-year retrospective, presenting a selection of abstract paintings from 1983 to the present. Ahn, who lives and works in Los Angeles, has focused much of his career on the meticulous depiction of water and the ocean. In the summer of 1983 he suffered the traumatic experience of being lost at sea in a small fishing boat, engulfed by dense fog that lifted only after he had drifted alone in the water for many hours. Plagued by depression and professional disappointments, that forced him to destroy most of his earlier paintings, Ahn experienced the terrifying incident as profoundly transformative. In presenting a key selection of Ahn's late Water and other paintings, this comprehensive exhibition explores both the sharp-edged existentialism and immersive spirituality inherent in Ahn's large-scale abstractions.

— Curatorial text courtesy The Long Beach Museum of Art