In the summer of 1983, artist Young-il Ahn set off in a rented dinghy toward the horizon. The painter frequently sought solace in the waters between Santa Monica and Catalina Island, taking only a fishing rod and sketchbook. That day, he was soon enveloped in fog so thick he couldn’t see an inch in any direction.
A crushing fear set in, and the fog felt like a heavy weight on his chest. He turned off the engine and left his fate to the waves. Then in an instant, the ocean revealed itself in all its colors — like pearls of all shades scattered as far as the eye could see. In a moment at once rapturous and humbling, Ahn felt himself a part of the ocean, the ocean a part of him.
He’s been painting what he saw in that instant ever since, calling his evolving body of work the “Water Series.” They are canvases of all sizes filled with meticulous square knife strokes that leap off the canvas like waves — at once still and dynamic, monochromatic and iridescent.
Now, at age 83, the Korean American artist is getting recognition after half a century of relative obscurity in his adopted home of Los Angeles.
The acclaim has changed little of Ahn’s days.
Today, as he has for decades, he sits in front of a canvas in his studio, a converted furniture factory near the 10 Freeway where the air is rich with the scent of spike lavender oil he uses to thin paint. He steadies the right hand impaired by a stroke, subtly tilts his head left and right like a bird, and takes his painting knife from palette to canvas, palette to canvas.
And once more the Pacific bubbles up before him. Born in prewar North Korea, Ahn was a prodigious child who painted and drew throughout his childhood in Japan and South Korea. He studied art at the nation’s premier Seoul National University. Art materials were so difficult to come by that he and other students resorted to cloth used to wrap dead bodies in lieu of canvases. Yet he always found a way to paint.
Ahn won national awards and was a darling among foreign collectors in postwar Seoul. Even so, he grew eager to get out from the shadow of his father, a painter and art professor. He and a handful of artists left South Korea when it was still a dirt-poor nation that was mostly sending miners and nurses abroad to earn foreign currency.
