LEE: You mentioned that you began teaching yourself to paint seriously during your third year of university. What prompted that decision? What kinds of paintings were you making at the time, and what was your style like?

Ahn: When I was studying at Korea National University of Arts, installation art and conceptual art were considered the dominant practices, and I was making that kind of work as well. Then, during my third year, I suddenly felt a strong desire to paint and began doing so on my own. I didn't think I was particularly good at it, so I painted in secret.

Once I had accumulated a reasonable body of work, I showed it to friends and senior classmates to ask for their opinions. They told me that my paintings seemed to have more potential than my installation works. Since I wanted to make a living as an artist, I decided to focus on the medium that appeared to offer greater possibilities. From the summer break of my third year onward, I devoted myself to painting in earnest, and I have continued ever since.

LEE: At that time, were there any particular artists or painting styles that appealed to you?

Ahn: Around the time I started painting, the Young British Artists (YBAs), the Charles Saatchi Collection, and exhibitions such as 《Sensation》 (1997) and 《The Triumph of Painting》 (2005) were major topics of discussion. Many artists of my generation were deeply influenced by them. Around the same time, Arario Gallery in Cheonan presented 《Cold Hearts: Artists from Leipzig》 (2005). Visiting exhibitions like these, I became fascinated by European Neo-Expressionist painting.

LEE: In your early works, you reconstructed images drawn from newspapers, magazines, films, television dramas, and other forms of mass media to address themes such as violence and oppression imposed from outside. Around 2014, however, your focus shifted away from issues of external systems, power structures, and violence toward more fundamental questions of painting itself.

Since then, discussions of your practice have consistently emphasized how you "experiment with the essence and limits of painting" and "foreground its materiality." Your paintings are rich in narrative while simultaneously demonstrating the expressive power and material presence of the medium. In doing so, they engage not only with the history of painting but also with broader questions about painting—and art—itself.

Although the limitations and crises of painting have been debated for decades, painting continues to occupy a significant position, and likely always will. You have also spoken about encountering your own limitations as an artist. Could you elaborate on what those limitations are? What questions do you ask of painting through your work?

Ahn: If my years in Korea were a time of becoming familiar with the materials of painting, then my years studying in the Netherlands were devoted to learning about the history of painting and the artists who shaped it. The first work I made there was Punishment (2009–2012), which dealt with traumas rooted in my upbringing in Korea.

I wanted to address the physical violence I experienced in middle and high school, military culture, and broader social issues. But people in the Netherlands found it difficult to relate to these experiences and began asking why I was dealing with such subjects there and then. At the time, I believed that art should embody a spirit of resistance and social criticism.

I had been taught that speaking out on social issues was both an important responsibility and a duty of the artist. The Netherlands, however, offered a much freer perspective in that regard. It was there that I decided to return to painting itself and to approach its most fundamental question: What is painting? I genuinely wanted to understand the essence of painting.

From that point onward, and throughout the latter part of my stay in the Netherlands, I continued exploring this question and gradually translated that inquiry into images.

Of course, these were not easy questions to pursue. The more I read books on art theory and philosophy, the darker and more solemn my paintings became. I think my own sense of being lost found its way into the enclosed spaces that appeared in my work—darkrooms, studios, and other confined interiors.

It was around then that I introduced the rabbit into my paintings, investing it with symbolic meaning, as though it possessed the answers I was searching for. The rabbit continues to appear in my recent work as well, representing an object of desire that I long to capture. In the ‘Hunt’ series (2014), that desire to catch the rabbit is made explicit. Rabbits also appeared in the work of Joseph Beuys, an artist I greatly admired.

Looking back now, I think I had reached a point where I felt incapable of creating something genuinely new. Painting is, after all, a creative act, but I found myself asking only questions, without arriving anywhere new. Eventually, I became exhausted and decided to return to Korea.

Around the time I made that decision, the Sewol ferry disaster occurred, followed by the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Although neither tragedy affected me personally, I found myself deeply absorbed by the emotion of grief. My attention shifted toward a new question: How can grief be expressed through painting? I did not want to approach death sentimentally or as an empty abstraction.

Instead, I wanted to engage with it seriously, alongside the more fundamental questions I had been asking about painting itself. I wanted to create works that carried emotion while also revealing the painter's attitude toward the act of making. I also turned to the work of Bas Jan Ader as a point of reference. All of these ideas developed simultaneously.

When I resumed working in Korea, the most important keywords for me were "to fall" and "to disappear." From these emerged a wide range of images that I could imagine, eventually leading to another idea: "to cut away."

LEE: Questions about painting itself can easily become abstract or overly conceptual when expressed through painting, but your work never feels that way. I suspect that has to do with the emotional dimension you bring into it.

Ahn: Artists are human beings, too. We live with a desire for something new and creative, but we breathe, see, and feel just like everyone else. The kind of painting I have always aspired to make is one that embodies universal values—something people can genuinely relate to. Because of that, I have tended to build my compositions upon carefully accumulated structures with a sense of universality, rather than relying on chance or arbitrary expression.

I watched a great deal of old Korean films and television commercials. Those films often employed stable compositions and frequent close-ups. Although they moved at a slower pace, the way they gradually drew the viewer in felt more compelling to me than flashy camera work. That influence naturally led me to build stage-like sets for my paintings.

When working on larger pieces, I color my idea sketches, create photographic collages, and sometimes even build miniature sets. I go through quite an extensive preparatory process. I also document performances that I stage myself and use those records as the basis for paintings, which I think contributes to their dramatic quality. For The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Théodore Géricault observed and painted actual corpses.

His desire to paint overcame his fear. I was deeply drawn to that kind of desire. It inspired the series of paintings depicting my own hands and feet. Rather than someone else's limbs, I placed the painter's own hands and feet on the canvas—sometimes as though they had been severed from the body, sometimes arranged within a calm and stable composition.

Until fairly recently, I continued making works that connected the painter's desire with grief. More recently, however, I have begun exploring a different direction, and that shift can be seen in the ‘Storm Is Coming’ series (2021–2022).

LEE: It may be difficult to generalize, but I personally think painting is a medium that allows for particularly direct and immediate expression. It can reveal not only physicality and materiality, but also the artist's psychology. Yet your work seems to arrive at these qualities through an extremely deliberate and carefully planned process.

Ahn: Chance may play a role when deciding what to paint. But once I enter the planning stage, I spend an enormous amount of time thinking, constructing images, taking notes, researching references, and approaching the work from multiple angles. To give a specific example, I carefully determine the scale of each image within the canvas and exactly where it will be cropped.

Even if I have an idea sketch or a miniature model, there is always a significant gap between what exists in my mind and what actually appears on the canvas. The moment I stand in front of the canvas, everything has to be resolved within that space, so as soon as I pick up the brush, the process enters an entirely different phase.

Even while painting, I continually evaluate what will be most effective and make adjustments accordingly. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that there is very little improvisation in my practice.

LEE: Although the process probably varies from work to work, how much time do you typically spend preparing a painting? It seems that a considerable amount of time is essential to your practice.

Ahn: Everything begins with thinking, so it takes quite a long time before a work is completed. In the case of the ‘Storm Is Coming’ series, it took me about two to three years from the initial conception to reaching the point where I was confident enough to realize it. The actual time spent painting was surprisingly short.

What helped enormously was the ‘Everyday; After Storm’ series (2020), which I presented in my solo exhibition in the Netherlands in 2020. Those were relatively small paintings, but ‘Everyday; After Storm’ was actually the more difficult series to make. When I first conceived it, I wanted to express the condition of the world as I saw it at the time. I wanted the paintings to be both devastating and beautiful.

Even after a storm has torn everything apart, I hoped that everything left behind could still be perceived as beautiful. Artists are human beings, and instinctively we tend to move toward what is familiar and comfortable. Even a small change is difficult—it takes tremendous courage. That said, the artists who continue to receive strong recognition are often those who keep changing.

LEE: One passage from your artist statement for ‘Storm Is Coming’ (2021) particularly stayed with me: "I constantly worked to maintain the tension between two approaches without allowing them to clash: the realistic depiction employed for representation (the rocky mountain) and the intuitive expression of the subject (the storm clouds)."

I found this especially compelling because it carefully stages the long-standing relationship between representation and expression in painting—juxtaposing the depiction of a solid, materially tangible object with the expressive rendering of clouds, which are amorphous and impossible to grasp either physically or spatially.

Likewise, your use of photographic collage drawings and your process of working from physical reconstructions—miniatures, staged sets, and performed actions—also seems to be an investigation into the relationships between materiality and image, reality and mimesis. This is evident in works such as Cutout (2019–2020) and even more strongly in Imitation (2015). I would love to hear your thoughts on this aspect of your practice.

Ahn: It was intentional from the very beginning. I wanted to understand the fundamental nature of the painter and of painting itself. I approach my practice as a form of studying painting. As I gradually come to understand what I previously did not know, new forms of imagination emerge.

Discourses on painting and writings by art theorists stimulate my imagination, and I also draw inspiration from conversations with other artists and people around me. During the Dutch Golden Age, landscape painting flourished. One artist there once told me that this was because the Dutch sky appears unusually low.

Having lived there myself, I felt the same way—the sky seemed so low that the clouds felt remarkably close. As a result, the landscape appeared extraordinarily dramatic. I cannot say with certainty why painters traveled such great distances to paint landscapes, but that very desire of the painter has become a source of imagination for me.

Among all the elements of the landscape, I was particularly drawn to clouds because they are constantly changing. Other things remain relatively fixed, but clouds appear, disappear, and continuously transform in shape and character. Human desire—and the desire of the painter—is much the same. It can surge with intensity and vanish in an instant. What I especially wanted to depict were clouds tossed about within a storm, clouds in violent motion.

LEE: So rather than portraying yourself, your work is really an exploration of painting and of what painting is capable of containing?

Ahn: It is an exploration driven by my own interests and insights. None of the subjects I choose are unrelated to my own life, and everything I produce ultimately begins with me. Without my own presence, such an inquiry would not even be possible.

LEE: In works such as Washing Hands (2015) and Washing Feet (2015), you not only focused on the tactile sensation of paint touching the body, but also incorporated the act of washing it away. Why did you choose to capture that particular moment?

Ahn: The entire performance—the whole sequence of actions—was important to me. The act of applying paint to my body already reveals something about my identity. I am a painter, after all; that is why I carefully covered myself with paint in the first place. Initially, I had only considered the act of applying the paint. But once it dried, removing it became painful. The sensations of applying and washing away the paint were completely different.

Washing it off felt almost like an act of repentance, or as though I were reversing the entire process. It became ritualistic. There is a definite difference between physically performing an action yourself and merely imagining it. I think that direct experience made the work feel much more immediate. As I continued studying painting, I also realized that I needed to paint not distant subjects, but events unfolding directly before my eyes and on my own body.

Before asking what such an act might mean, I first wanted to experience it physically. I felt that painting paint onto my own body—rather than simply onto a canvas—was a primal experience that could bring me closer to painting and deepen my understanding of it. One theorist has described the Altamira Cave paintings as humanity's first gallery.

If you look closely at those cave paintings, there are places where the makers left handprints in pigment, almost as if signing their work. There is an unmistakable intention to show themselves, and those marks also embody the identity of the prehistoric people who made them. I consider the person who left those handprints to be an artist.

These ideas found their way into Hands of Painters (2015), part of the ‘White Night–Black Variation’ series. I pinned a photograph of the Altamira cave paintings to the wall of my studio, pressed my own painted hand onto it, and then painted that image. My decision to apply paint directly onto my body began there.

That line of inquiry later developed further into the ‘Pause & Gesture’ series. Those works were almost the last in which the artist's own body appeared directly as the subject of the painting. Perhaps because they left such a strong impression, many people assume I worked on that series for a long time, but in fact it lasted only about one or two years.

LEE: Since most paintings are exhibited hanging on walls, the central area of a gallery is often left empty. I don't mean that in the sense of feeling vacant, but I'm curious how much thought you give to that central space when installing an exhibition, and whether it influences your work.

Ahn: The meaning of the central space varies depending on the type of work being exhibited. If the exhibition consists solely of paintings on the wall, I think it's perfectly appropriate to leave the center open for the viewer.

LEE: Do you have any plans to work in media other than painting?

Ahn: As a viewer, I enjoy video exhibitions very much. Because I know so much about the process of making paintings, I tend to become overly analytical and find it difficult simply to enjoy them.

Occasionally I still get excited when I encounter a painting that completely exceeds my expectations, but it's hard for me to experience painting in a relaxed way. I do have an interest in making small sculptures. It's not something I'll be pursuing in the immediate future, but I already have a few ideas in mind.

LEE: There was something particularly overwhelming about the ‘Storm Is Coming’ series. For me, it evoked British and German Romanticism, and even Wuthering Heights (1847) came to mind. It wasn't simply because of the title or the motif. There was something within the paintings that suggested a literary narrative, almost like the atmosphere of a novel.

Despite your highly deliberate and carefully planned approach to selecting subjects and constructing the works, the paintings still conveyed a remarkably condensed emotional intensity.

Ahn: Anxiety has long been one of the central elements of my work. Beneath anxiety lie sadness and melancholy—they are all part of the same emotional mass. People often say that sadness is the emotion with which we most readily empathize. We tend to relate more deeply to darkness than to brightness. I suppose those emotions have always existed within me, and perhaps I have even been drawn to them.

No matter how much I try to leave them behind, those themes seem to follow me. I think those emotional undercurrents found a more complete expression in ‘Storm Is Coming’. When preparing the exhibition 《Storm Is Coming》, I conceived it as a trilogy. I actually painted the conclusion first, in the ‘Everyday; After Storm’ series.

In ‘Storm Is Coming’, I wanted to portray the moment before the storm fully breaks—not yet violent, but with a gentle wind beginning to blow, as anxiety gradually builds and tension quietly intensifies. I was also thinking about the Coen brothers' film A Serious Man (2009). In its final scene, after the protagonist has endured relentless stress and reached an emotional breaking point, a tornado approaches.

I wanted to evoke that same feeling of suffocating uncertainty and impending anxiety. During the pandemic, I felt that people had reached their limits. I don't know when I'll eventually make it, but I hope one day to paint the storm at its very peak—to capture the tragic beauty that exists within the storm itself.

LEE: In ‘Storm Is Coming’, the figure of Mary is immediately recognizable as the Virgin Mary. Yet she doesn't function primarily as a religious symbol. Traditionally, the Virgin Mary is understood as a mediator between God and humanity. What does she represent in your work? What is she mediating? Her expression and facial features also feel strikingly familiar, which led me to look at historical paintings of the Virgin Mary. Was there a particular image or artwork that you referenced?

Ahn: People who have no interest in religion usually don't recognize her as the Virgin Mary. On the other hand, Christians often ask me why I chose to depict her. Some visitors mentioned various paintings of the Virgin Mary they were familiar with, but interestingly, no one identified the image I had actually referenced. About two years earlier, I happened to come across Hans Holbein's Mary as the Mother of Sorrows (1495).

The first painting I made, Mary & White Bird (2021), is the closest to Holbein's image. In the later works, however, the resemblance gradually becomes less recognizable. What I paid the greatest attention to was Mary's gaze. The figure of Mary, burdened with the sorrow of a mother, gave me a sense of comfort. I was deeply moved by the idea that even a being who offers consolation to humanity could herself be filled with grief.

That is why I wanted viewers to feel sadness rather than sacredness. This was also one of the first times I had placed a human figure so prominently in my paintings. Had 《Storm Is Coming》consisted only of landscapes, it would have remained primarily a painterly experience. The presence or absence of a figure makes an enormous difference. By introducing Mary, I believe the emotions I wanted to convey became significantly more powerful.

LEE: Looking at the sorrowful figure of Mary, I was reminded of Stabat Mater, and I found myself listening to Vivaldi's setting of the piece. This is, of course, an entirely personal and subjective impression, but I felt that the music resonated remarkably well with your paintings.

As I listened, it occurred to me that although your work is a visual medium, it conveys an atmosphere much like that of music. As I mentioned earlier, perhaps this is because such powerful emotional and psychological currents seem to flow through your paintings.

Ahn: Actually, I painted them thinking not so much of tears as of raindrops splashing across the surface. As the rain scattered, it naturally created a sense of rhythm. I worked while searching for that rhythmic quality within the composition. I wanted the realism of the figure and the freer brushwork of the paint to exist in harmony. Had I painted only the figure, I think the image would have appeared rather rigid.

When I painted the raindrops, I believe a degree of spontaneity entered the work that had not been present in my earlier paintings. In a sense, I had previously allowed no room for mistakes. I approached each painting with the answer already determined, following the plan I had established from the outset. Because the process of reflection was so important to me, the work may have become somewhat rigid.

You can actually see this shift in my collage drawings. Up through Storm 1–6, every drawing and collage was executed according to a carefully calculated plan. But from Storm 7–23 onward, I began to enjoy the process itself. I forgot about themes such as death and disappearance. I simply found pleasure in the act of painting. The expressions became freer and much more intuitive.

LEE: Death and disappearance seem to run through your work in every respect—as an emotional undercurrent, as subject matter, and as theme. Works such as Legs (2014), Folding Your Hands (2014), and Standing on Tiptoe (2016) endlessly question existence, evoking the loneliness, sorrow, and anxiety of individuals confronting a world that refuses to answer.

At the same time, whether depicting figures or still lifes, your paintings often resemble fossils—their vitality seems suspended through your treatment of color and form. Although action and emotion are clearly conveyed, the depicted subjects appear frozen in time. One could therefore interpret your work not only through the relationship between reality and image, but also through the relationship between life and death.

A dead being ceases to move and eventually disappears, yet acquires a kind of permanence through the traces it leaves behind and through the memories of others. Likewise, the painted image does not exist in the same way as its real-world referent, yet it, too, achieves a form of permanence. In that sense, your paintings seem to inhabit both the material and corporeal realm and the immaterial realm, the visible world and the invisible one.

Ahn: I think my work reflects not only questions of death but also multiple strands of art-historical discourse surrounding painting, whether consciously or unconsciously. As I mentioned earlier, my earlier works were structured primarily around asking questions. Now, however, I try to absorb those questions more naturally into the paintings themselves. Perhaps that is simply a gift that comes with the accumulation of time and experience.

LEE: This is a slightly different question. In the ‘Unfinished Stories’ series (2013), what exactly are The End (2013) and the two works titled Untitled (2013) depicting?

Ahn: I actually have two different series that include works titled Untitled, but they stem from almost the same idea. They are based on fragmentary thoughts that surfaced while living my daily life or while developing new works. They are, quite literally, brief thoughts or short narratives rather than parts of a larger storyline or overarching meaning. At first, I used dates as titles, but I later standardized them all as Untitled.

Unfinished Stories depicts scenes of war, explosions, and laboratory environments associated with them. The ‘Untitled–Abandoned Ideas’ series, on the other hand, draws upon images from old films, advertisements, and even pornography. If you look at Korean advertisements from the 1970s, for example, they strongly emphasize family values and filial piety.

My 2017 painting of a man pinching his own cheek is based on a modified scene from the film A Bloodthirsty Killer (1965). Early in the film, there is an intriguing sequence involving a painter, the subject of a painting, and a collector. I was also interested in a work that enlarges the faces of the figures from 雲雨圖帖 (Album of Erotic Paintings) by Kim Hong-do. Although the figures are caught in moments of intense passion, their expressions all appear strangely sorrowful, and that contradiction fascinated me.

LEE: Works such as 27sec. 67 (2015), in which you respond to another artist's creation and transform it into your own painting, also prompt reflection on our image-saturated age—a world increasingly mediated by images rather than direct experience. As a painter, I imagine you have particular thoughts about living in a world governed by images rather than reality.

Ahn: I think what I do is search for patterns and trajectories within the endless flood of images surrounding us. Perhaps the role of a contemporary painter is to receive those images according to one's own sensibility and character, and then reorganize, edit, and reinterpret them. None of us—not even artists—can stop that flood of images or escape from it. It has also become incredibly easy to acquire images.

People who are not artists often regard images as repositories of memory or nostalgia. I approach them somewhat more critically, even cynically. I reshape them according to my own way of thinking. What matters to me is how an image is ultimately read. Rather than dwelling on personal memories, I reinterpret images through my own perspective and present them to others.

Lately, I think I have been handling images in a rougher, even somewhat more violent way. The rocky mountain in ‘Storm Is Coming’, for example, was reconstructed from photographs that I took myself. It was based on the slopes of Bukhansan, where trees were scattered throughout the rocky terrain. But I removed them all.

I wanted the primal sensation of the storm clouds I was trying to express to collide with the rocky mountain in a harmonious way, so I eliminated every element I considered unnecessary. It was a process of selection and concentration. Had I felt a sentimental attachment to the mountain itself, I probably would not have been able to do that. Perhaps that somewhat cynical attitude is, in the end, how I approach images.

References

• [인터뷰] 안지산
  [Interview] Jisan Ahn