Germany has long played a leading role in shaping global currents in art, hosting major international art events such as documenta in Kassel, as well as numerous biennales and triennales. Among its cities, Berlin is especially beloved by artists as a gathering place where diverse cultures converge.

In this series, I hope to meet various art professionals working in Berlin and share their thoughts and philosophies with the readers of Slow News. (Author)

For the sixth installment of this interview series, I met artist Jaehong Ahn, who has been active in Canada as well as Berlin and Leipzig, Germany. Exploring themes of isolation and opposition in his work, he continues his practice in Berlin, a city marked by a history of division and reunification.

- Date: Mid-December 2015
- Location: Jaehong Ahn’s studio

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank artist Soyoung Lee for her help in documenting the interview with photographs.

-First of all, among the many cities in Europe, I’m curious about what led you to stay and work in Berlin, the capital of Germany.

I did not come to Germany with Berlin specifically in mind. I initially came to Germany to participate in a residency program in Leipzig, a city about two hours by car from Berlin. I arrived in Germany about three months before the residency was scheduled to begin, so I had the chance to get a brief taste of life in Berlin beforehand.


-Since you were doing a residency program in Leipzig, did you come to Berlin first simply because of your flight arrangements and stay there briefly?

No, it was quite intentional. I anticipated that by the time my residency in Leipzig came to an end, I would have two or three options ahead of me. I would have to decide whether to remain in Germany and continue working with either Leipzig or Berlin as my base, or return directly to North America.

I thought that, however brief, having some experience of living and working in Berlin beforehand would help me make that decision later with less wasted time and fewer regrets.


-Was there any particular reason you chose Berlin?

I think a long-standing concern I had about my working process can answer that question. Perhaps the most common way for artists to work is to establish one central theme and produce several coherent series of works around it. By contrast, I found it difficult to fully understand the practice of “distributing” a particular subject across more than one work.

Whatever the subject might be, I tended to try to contain it completely within a single work. Once that particular work was finished, I would feel as though I had emptied everything out without any lingering attachment, and afterward I would no longer want to repeat anything—the same or similar subject, composition, saturation, or anything else.

In the end, for the sake of preserving the individuality of each work, I consciously sacrificed the kind of unity and consistency that works within a series commonly possess.

I continued working in this way until around 2010, when I happened to have an opportunity to sit down alone and calmly look through all of my works from the previous six or seven years in chronological order, one by one. I am still not entirely sure whether I had unconsciously been denying it until I could no longer do so, or whether I genuinely had not recognized it before.

What is certain, however, is that at that moment I simultaneously became aware of and acknowledged the themes and emotional undercurrents of separation or isolation that had been embedded in almost every one of my works without exception.

At the time, I had been searching for such a theme. I longed for a subject that was already intimate enough that I would not have to deceive myself while working, yet one that also possessed a resonance capable of expanding freely into the broader social realm. Once I began to see it, I became restless. I started wondering what kind of environment might be even slightly more ideal for delving more deeply into these themes.

I thought that a place currently experiencing social division, or one where the history or remnants of separation, isolation, and opposition had been preserved, could provide a meaningful psychological backdrop for my work. I considered a number of countries and regions that met these conditions, including Korea and Germany.

As I considered Korea, I realized that although the country had clearly been experiencing a nationwide state of confrontation for roughly seventy years, discussions and differing views on division tended not to circulate freely within society, but instead were often reduced to particular ideological positions.

Germany, on the other hand, was commemorating approximately twenty years since reunification in 2010 and was actively revisiting the gap between its history of division and its present reunified society. A wide range of views on division and reunification circulated in ways that were relatively fluid and took on interesting forms rather than becoming rigid.

This led me to conclude that Germany would offer an ideal environment for my work. And within Germany, I eventually came to Berlin, one of the cities most emblematic of the experience of division.


-So you came to Germany, and specifically Berlin, in order to further develop the themes of your work. After the residency program, you returned to Berlin. Did Leipzig not have much of an influence on your practice?

Leipzig had a significant influence on my work. Personally, both Leipzig and Berlin offer extremely compelling environments for me as a painter. One of the main reasons I came to Germany with Leipzig in mind in the first place was the appeal of the city’s own distinct history of separation and isolation, which differs from that of Berlin.

Having worked within the boundaries of portraiture and figurative painting for more than ten years, Leipzig was the first place that suggested to me—and gave me the opportunity to consider for myself—that “perhaps it is possible to move within and coexist with the currents of contemporary art without deliberately rejecting the figurative elements in my work.”


-You continued working at the residency in Leipzig before moving to Berlin. Did you relocate to Berlin immediately after completing the residency program?

No, I did not move to Berlin immediately after finishing the residency. Leipzig was the place that enabled me to change the approach and style of the working process I had been pursuing since my time in North America, so it was not easy to leave. There was also something compelling about the “timeless” community of artists there, where figurative painting still remained dominant—as if it might suddenly disappear the moment I looked away.

It had a subtle appeal that made me feel I needed to keep watching it closely. Hoping that the changes taking place in my work there would continue to develop and become firmly established, I stayed in Leipzig for another nine months after completing the nine-month residency program.

I was able to continue working in another studio within the same Spinnerei complex, provided through the residency. In the end, I spent about a year and a half living and working in Leipzig.

-You could have continued staying and working in Leipzig, yet you chose to move your studio to Berlin, where you had briefly lived before. Was there a particular reason you decided to relocate your workspace to Berlin?

Leipzig has its own distinctive dark energy. Even on a bright summer day, there is something about it that evokes a sense of shade and dampness...

Unexpectedly, this atmosphere provides artists with both the physical and psychological conditions needed to immerse themselves in their work. That alone is an enormous attraction. But no matter how ideal something may be, it is difficult to remain satisfied while confined within an extremely simplified and narrow range of choices. Personally, I am also not the type of person who can endure an environment dominated by just one color for a long time. (Laughs)

In that sense, Leipzig felt remarkably uniform as a city. I could no longer find another area within Leipzig that might offer some new kind of stimulation. Berlin, by contrast, as I had experienced it, was a city where districts with vastly different characters and appearances coexisted. I think it was this diversity that drew me back here.


-Talking with you makes me especially curious about what life in Leipzig must have been like, perhaps because I have spent most of my own time in Berlin. After going through various stages, you are now working in Berlin. Before living in German cities such as Berlin and Leipzig, where were you based?

Before coming to Germany, I mainly worked and exhibited in Canada. Of course, I still continue my practice while moving between Canada and Germany.


-Then when did you first experience living and working in Europe?

During my fourth year at university, there was a kind of Off-Campus Program that allowed students to spend a year in Florence, Italy, focusing on writing their thesis and completing their graduation work. As I understand it, it is a long-running program in which the school selects twenty-five applicants from the third- and fourth-year classes each year and sends them to Florence with a small group of faculty members.

I stayed in Florence for a year, working and living while regularly using a school-managed studio building that students could access twenty-four hours a day.


-What kind of work were you mainly making in Florence?

I did not make Renaissance-style work simply because I was in Florence, Italy. I worked quite freely. Technically, I used classical brushwork, but I painted quiet, empty spaces that seemed as though a figure had just left them, spaces still filled with the presence of some unknown person.

Through the traces and remnants of human activity left behind in those spaces, I tried to express another side of the human figure—something like “portraiture without the physical presence of the figure.”

-You mentioned earlier that you have been working in figurative painting for more than ten years. Is there a particular reason why you have continued to work with figurative painting grounded in portraiture rather than exploring other formats?

I could always try working with media other than figurative painting. I do not draw any strict boundaries around that. I simply think there is no need to pursue those kinds of multidisciplinary approaches or experiments with materials until I genuinely feel the desire to do so.

At the moment, that urge to expand is simply not very strong. Some artists may focus on building outward, while others may move inward, digging deeper and creating resonance through that process. And I think the art world is a place where these tendencies can reverse in an instant without necessarily requiring any single convincing reason.

Right now, I find it extremely interesting to witness a three-dimensional worldview that could become my signature gradually taking shape on a two-dimensional surface. Once that reaches a certain degree of stability, I intend to introduce other forms or figures into it and disrupt that balance again. If, at that point, a particular medium seems appropriate, there would be no reason not to use it.


-Let us continue talking about your work. Earlier, while discussing Leipzig, you mentioned changes in your working method. I think not only I but also the readers of this interview would be curious about how you actually work and what kinds of elements influence that process.

The structure of my work involves forms emerging on the canvas through repeated cycles of order and disorder. At first, as in many abstract paintings, random lines and shapes seem to be placed across the canvas. Then, through selective omission and development, there comes a point when an illusion resembling figurative painting begins to emerge.

From that moment on, the painting passes through numerous deliberate stages of constructing order and then destroying that order, until at some point it reaches completion.

There are also times when I receive intuitive inspiration from audiovisual media. It is extremely rare for the original composition, form, or color to remain intact through to the finished work, but many paintings begin with a fleeting thought while watching some unspecified visual material: “Oh, that frame is interesting... maybe I should try working with that kind of feeling.”

In most cases, however, any trace of the image that served as the starting point eventually disappears somewhere within the many accumulated layers of order and chaos.

-It is interesting that while the overall direction of your work is figurative, your working process begins from abstraction. This may be a somewhat sudden question, but much of your work consists of three-dimensional figurative paintings. Personally, I feel that today there are many materials capable of effectively creating a sense of three-dimensionality, and works made with such materials are no longer unfamiliar within contemporary art. Is there a particular reason why you choose to express the dimensionality you mentioned through canvas, a medium so closely associated with the flatness of painting?

I am skeptical about how many painters who create three-dimensional worlds on flat surfaces would really respond to the suggestion that “there are more effective materials available.” I imagine quite a few artists would simply end the conversation by saying, “No, this is the most effective medium.”

Why the brush? In a world now overflowing more than ever with materials and technologies capable of reproducing physical reality, why do we still turn to illusion? I think part of the answer may lie in the fact that being a “painter” is one of the rare modern professions whose origins can be traced directly back to the simple play of childhood.

Even as this childhood play develops, so to speak, into a means and a way of life, its essential nature as “play” undergoes remarkably little transformation.

Because of this, I sometimes think the gap may never fully close between the position of an outside observer, who feels compelled to question the mechanism, legitimacy, and validity of its effects through countless acts of conscious intellectual labor, and that of painters, who continue to carry this instinctive sense of play with them throughout the process.

To answer this question, it would be difficult not to mention that dusty old cliché often used by artists when referring to works made by their own hands: “They are like my children.” Much like this cliché suggests, some artists go through the process of drawing and erasing the same line countless times while making a single work.

It is also common to spend hours, sometimes even days, agonizing over whether to keep a single brushstroke or not. Whether this kind of dilemma is experienced by the artist as “a problem of materials that needs to be improved” or as a form of love-hate play is ultimately both the artist’s prerogative and responsibility.

Every parent talks about the difficulties of raising a child, but I cannot help thinking that surprisingly few people would actually press a button if offered the chance to skip more than a decade in the blink of an eye and instantly turn their child into an adult.

In that sense, artistic practice seems quite similar to child-rearing: both involve an inherently contradictory form of play that exists somewhere far beyond the reach of rational, efficiency-driven thinking.

Rather than explaining it in terms of the kinds of necessity or justification proposed by contemporary art, I think it is difficult to answer this question without speaking about the particular sense of exhilaration that comes from physically moving a brush across the canvas—feeling something directly through the body, rejecting it, embracing it again, and then arriving at something I either intended to create or could never have anticipated.

Because artistic activity often takes the outward form of continually producing material objects, it can easily be mistaken for a form of production. But I believe that at its core lies a desire for immaterial consumption or expenditure. The closer one gets to that center, the less room there is for reason or efficiency to intervene.


-I hope my sudden question was not discourteous.

Not at all. It is fine. (Laughs)


-As we talk about your working process, I feel that the concepts of isolation and separation you mentioned at the beginning of the interview are also embedded in the process itself, in the repetition and interplay of order and disorder.

Yes. I think you could say that.


-This time, I would like to talk about the themes of your work. Through what kinds of experiences did themes such as isolation and separation come to enter your practice?

Rather than coming from specific personal experiences, I think those themes emerged from the emotional currents in the broader environment around me—the ones I was particularly adept at sensing.

-I see. Beyond the themes of isolation and separation, is there a particular worldview of your own that you feel is embedded in your work?

I try not to settle into any one fixed worldview. And for now, I do not want to limit the scope of my works by imposing my own narrow worldview on them. For me, this ‘separation/isolation/opposition’ series is not an act of expression or assertion, but one of contemplation or observation.

If we were to imagine a concept as a mountain, then the process would be like taking dozens of photographs of that mountain from different distances, angles, and emotional perspectives, and recording them.

It would be more accurate to say that I want to observe the process through which the terrain and boundaries of these concepts gradually reveal themselves.

Had I imposed a particular worldview of my own onto the works, perhaps I would have regarded isolation and separation, even implicitly, as some kind of “incomplete condition that must somehow be overcome and restored to unity.” Or perhaps I might have gone in the opposite direction.


-You continue to work between Canada in North America and Berlin in Europe. What do you see as the advantages of Berlin?

Ahn: If I compare it with the art scene in North America, I feel that Pop Art and kitsch still occupy a major place in the North American art market. As a result, the work of artists who do not participate in those tendencies can often appear more experimental or adventurous.

Berlin, by contrast, seems less dominated by any single artistic movement and more like a place where many different currents coexist. I would say that one of its greatest advantages is precisely that it is a space where diversity is naturally carried forward.


-Does Berlin influence your work significantly in that respect?

Rather than any individual element within Berlin influencing me, it is the diversity of atmospheres and tendencies that permeate society as a whole that has a strong impact. These atmospheres and tendencies are not formed only temporarily but continue over time, and I think that continuity itself has a significant influence on my work.

The greatest influence may be my unconscious belief that when my work expands into society or reaches a broader public, Berlin is a place where it can be accepted.


-Lastly, could you briefly tell us about your plans in Berlin going forward?

I plan to continue exhibiting new works in Berlin.


-I will be sure to come and see your exhibition when you show in Berlin. Thank you for generously agreeing to this interview despite being busy at the end of the year. Happy New Year.

Thank you. I appreciate your work as well. Happy New Year.

References

• [인터뷰] 베를린 사람들: 분리/고립/대립 – 안재홍 인터뷰
  [Interview] Berlin People: Separation / Isolation / Opposition – Interview with Jaehong Ahn