Installation view of 《Sang : Froid》 © WWNN

Modernity has dismantled religion and mythology. Regardless of whether they function properly, we, having lost absolute authority and morality, drift through an increasingly disorienting world as separate individuals, as if standards have disappeared and only power remains.

Jaehong Ahn’s paintings begin with a question: can individuals who are unable to reconcile with one another coexist despite remaining separate?Emerging in the 1920s amid the erosion of faith in absolutes, Surrealist painting sought to embody the unconscious world that exists beyond human perception, while exposing the forms of oppression imposed by contemporary society and constructing alternative ways of seeing.

Ahn’s paintings may appear to retrace the path taken by Surrealist painting a century ago, but his practice places greater emphasis on conflict and fragmentation within that framework.


Installation view of 《Sang : Froid》 © WWNN

The artist faces a blank canvas and constructs abstract forms from a close distance that prevents him from taking in the composition as a whole. Under conditions of highly limited visual control, the movement of paint as it is splattered and layered leads to unconventional compositions. Ahn then captures the perspectives and arrangements that emerge from these unintended configurations, transforming them into concrete images.

Once freely formed images—created with little consideration for the original forms or colors of their subjects—have been placed on the canvas, he completes the work by refining their forms and applying color, much as one might revive a forgotten memory or artificially color a black-and-white film.

The resulting images evoke fantastical religious paintings or mythological narratives, rendered through classical subjects and realistic depiction. Yet the stories they appear to tell seem to point—or perhaps not point—to something that does not exist or has already lost its power.

Consider, for example, The Giver, included in the exhibition. The work appears to depict a scene from a pastoral landscape of the kind we commonly imagine. Yet it is difficult to find any sense of peace or harmony in this landscape. The trees and plants in the background are depicted as growing in excessively contorted forms or extending aggressively, as if seeking to secure their own space rather than coexist.

Against a halo-like sky, a sheepskin assumes a heroic presence, yet its protagonist has disappeared, leaving behind only an empty shell. The various organisms growing entangled around the sheepskin, which lies atop broken tools symbolizing an authority and mission that no longer function, might be read as an image of peace and coexistence. At the same time, however, they evoke the image of maggots swarming over a corpse.


Installation view of 《Sang : Froid》 © WWNN

Another work, I Don't Believe It's Him, similarly appears to depict a knight, or the white horse traditionally portrayed carrying a hero, but is in fact rendered as an illusory being composed of fragmented body parts and objects assembled without any apparent context. The landscape of ruins, with temple columns from an indeterminate era collapsing around it, can be understood through the shadows cast across the sky as a staged scene rather than an actual landscape.

The sun, or halo, that repeatedly appears in Ahn’s work is likewise rendered in sharp lines reminiscent of those found in Gothic painting, set against naturalistic skies, exposing its own fictitious, illusory nature.

Ahn’s paintings appear to evoke the separation and fragmentation of individual entities arising within the stillness and solemnity of classicism, as well as the destruction of absolutes and the fear of death that follows in its wake. At the same time, however, the solemnity and stillness maintained even within isolated and violent circumstances seem to hold out the possibility that, despite being separated from one another or becoming entangled in competition as distinct entities, we might still achieve a form of artistic balance and, ultimately, coexistence in life.

Of course, this expectation may never be fulfilled. Indeed, perhaps it never will be. Yet art is concerned less with catastrophe and endings than with unfulfilled desires and unattainable goals. To pursue ideals even in the face of a harsh reality, perhaps we need to look upon the ideal with a gaze even harsher than reality itself.

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