Lifting the Fog
Young Il-Ahn at LACMA
Clarity: what does a word like that mean today? There are plenty of interpretations that range from the literal to the psychological to the environmental. Abstraction (which rarely deals in clarity) oddly seems to provide one answer when in the hands of the Korean American artist Young-Il Ahn.
In an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called Unexpected Light: Works by Young-Il Ahn, the artist is featured in a small show featuring massive and serene canvases. Curated by Virginia Moon, assistant curator of Korean art at LACMA, this is also the first ever exhibition dedicated to a Korean American artist. (I think that is an egregious mistake on the institution’s part, but I digress.) The canvases themselves come from an ongoing series called Water. Since the 1980s, the 83 year-old Ahn has been evolving his style of small blocks of layered color. Shimmering monochromes from a distance, minute brushstrokes and pops of color reveal themselves when a viewer approaches these paintings.
Ahn has long lived along the Pacific Ocean, and this led to the genesis for this body of work. In 1983, the artist took a small fishing boat out onto the water. Ahn enjoyed this as a hobby, but he was suddenly in a serious situation: he surrounded by fog so thick he was left without any type of vision. The fog suddenly cleared and the ocean divulged all of its light and color. And with that mythical experience, an obsession was born.
Ranging from pale white and lavender to aggressive black and magenta, all of the works show a very studied sense of color. Fluorescent green is vibrating under little spots of black, and subtle layers of blue in another work recreate the languid movement of rippling waves. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that Ahn ranked among great masters of light, like Monet or Turner.
Although relatively outside the postwar dialogue around painting, Ahn shows similarities to artists of a similar age, like Robert Ryman, Yayoi Kusama, or even the late Alma Thomas. The difference is the feeling of supreme tranquility. These canvases are lush and full, but peaceful. They do not radiate the obsessive or frenetic qualities of postwar abstraction. They are great open expanses that are at once powerful and meditative.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, Ahn provides clarity, but in a spiritual sense. Much like how Ahn was enveloped by something so much larger than himself and reveled in wonder, the viewer receives the same taste of clarity with these great swathes of lustrous color.
