Jinseon Ahn (b. 1996) explores the subtle anxieties and vibrations sensed within urban environments and architectural spaces, focusing on how these sensations shape our spatial perception. In particular, she observes how physical elements—such as floors, walls, and ceilings—alter our awareness and bodily experience.
 
Through her exploration of anxiety, the city and its spaces are reconfigured into new forms, becoming key visual components in her work. These transformed elements manifest as installation pieces that invite viewers to re-experience a sense of unease through their interaction with the space.

Ahn’s work begins by blurring the boundary between personal sensations and the physical elements surrounding her body. For instance, she focuses on moments when vibrations felt through the floor or the noise coming from outside a highway bus window intersect with her own heartbeat or dizziness.
 
In these moments, she does not view anxiety as a purely negative sensation; instead, through close observation, she transforms it into a point of curiosity and interest.

The scenes she observes are rearticulated in the form of vibrations, tremors, leaning, facing, and collapse. Working from the perspective of an observer, Ahn captures experiences that unfold within urban spaces where most contemporary people spend their time. Using raw architectural materials commonly found throughout the city, she constructs spaces that feel both familiar and strangely unfamiliar.

In her first solo exhibition, 《Throbbing, Moving, Stopped》 (2023) at Mueumsanbang, Ahn presented installations and spatial compositions developed from her reflections on social anxiety. The exhibition space—composed of pulsating fabrics and their supporting legs, long and rigid props standing upright, precariously stacked paper tubes, and panels arranged to create loud, reverberating sounds—resembled scenes one might encounter at construction sites or along city roads.

Ahn expressed the anxieties she felt in the city through materials gathered from everyday life. By imagining the tangible and intangible anxieties that emerge within urban environments through the lens of materials specific to the city, and by translating them into lightweight, easily movable components, she sought to examine the instability and unsettled sensations inherent in anxiety.

Furthermore, the space and works reflected Ahn’s considerations of perspective and weight Since her earlier projects, she has shifted the vantage point from which she observes the city by adjusting the height of her viewpoint. In her exhibition 《Throbbing, Moving, Stopped》, she adopted the eye level experienced when riding a high-speed bus as a guiding perspective for the work.
 
From roughly two meters above the ground, the eye perceives things that cannot be seen from the expansive sky or low-lying areas. Positioned between the broad, bird-like view from above and the upward, insect-like glance from below, a natural sense of distance emerges, allowing the viewer to absorb everyday landscapes comfortably, while also experiencing the rapid, coarse pace at which everything passes by.

Meanwhile, the weight of materials determines the degree of stability in both the space and the work. In Ahn’s practice, construction materials such as cement, iron, and wood are classified by weight and serve as a primary source for the work. However, rather than selecting materials identical to those found in the actual city, she combines opposing properties—light and heavy, fixed and modular—to create entirely new objects.
 
In this way, the closer perspective to everyday life, along with the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, generates a state that disrupts conventional notions of stability.

The resulting space presented itself as a single scene where fragmented forms converged, creating a sense of instability that cultivated a feeling of unease in the viewer.
 
Objects were placed after precisely calculating the dimensions of the space and the distances between them, with careful consideration of material, size, and position. Light-looking brown cardboard tubes, stands resembling the color of cement and rebar, fabrics and bridges mimicking gray-toned roads, and smooth, opaque metal sheets—all materials familiar from the city—interacted atop the objects in this space, subtly misaligning with their conventional forms and colors.

Works that reference structures meant to be sturdy—such as bridges or iron overpasses connecting parts of the city—are constructed in a precarious manner, prompting viewers to imagine these structures collapsing and evoking a sense of anxiety. These pieces recall the loose, haphazard constructions that can exist within seemingly solid urban environments, creating an unsettling sense of foreboding.
 
Additionally, suspended works that sway in the air evoke the sensation of standing in a trembling subway or feeling one’s body shaken by the speed of other vehicles on the road, even when stationary, thereby recreating moments of everyday unease and vibrations.

Furthermore, these elements produce subtle vibrations within the space, rattling and trembling softly, creating the impression of transporting the everyday noises and vibrations of the city into the exhibition space.
 
As visitors move through and around these slightly displaced objects, they become immersed in the flow of unease. In the process, the work reveals the shifting structure of the space relative to the viewer’s physical position. This leads the audience to question the physical stability of the environment and confront a contradictory, disorienting moment in which they experience both anxiety and a sense of precarious balance simultaneously.

In the same year, Jinseon Ahn presented a large-scale installation with a kind of “temporary-architecture” quality in the group exhibition 《Soild, Weak, Temple》 at Chamber. This provisional construction was erected with angular corners softened by curved forms.
 
The sense of space rising from the ground was reinforced with wooden panels possessing their own weight and texture. The inherent solidity of the wood is translated into a smooth, fine-grained surface, while the seemingly firmly fixed structure transfers subtle vibrations in response to the footsteps of visitors.
 
By interacting with the audience’s bodily movements, these structures, which seemed to parasitize the floor and walls, began to function as part of a living landscape. At the same time, they assumed the role of a stage for other works, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, installation, and space.

In 2024, in the group exhibition 《Weaving Relations》 at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Jinseon Ahn presented works that visualized invisible elements within the city or wove forms discovered in urban spaces into new relational networks.
 
For example, Urban Model Study (2024) is an experimental work in which the forms Ahn observed in the cityscape are explored through the combination of various materials, fragmenting and enlarging the city as perceived by the artist to present an urban space from a viewpoint that allows a comprehensive overview.

Another work, the ‘Sliding Edge’ series, draws attention to overlooked spaces within the city. Furthermore, this work is installed not only in the exhibition space but also in dialogue with Doi Jaena’s Bricks, placed in the corridor, creating a new relational dynamic within the shared space.

Meanwhile, Jinseon Ahn’s new works presented in the 2025 group exhibition 《Ringing Saga》 at DOOSAN Gallery Seoul were based on her observations of scenes that evoke sensations of unease while slowly walking through the Jongno district.
 
Her gaze captures architectural landscapes of repeated crumbling and building with the life cycles of an aging city. Into the gallery, she brings architectural materials that have been left visible, as if it were impossible to conceal their traces; discarded furniture deemed to have outlived its usefulness; and curtains that await the new.

Her new works here take their names from objects found on the street: Bookshelf (2025), Drawer Cabinet (2025), Mattress (2025), and so forth.
 
These have been reconfigured in ways that differ from their original form and use, creating a landscape of urban reconstruction in their temporary gallery dwelling. Viewers experience vibrations that alternate between déja vu and jamais vu.

In this way, Jinseon Ahn reconstructs the subtle unease and vibrations she senses while slowly navigating the city into a synesthetic installation experience. By experimentally utilizing a variety of construction materials found in urban spaces—and juxtaposing heavy, fixed elements with lighter ones—she amplifies the tension within the space.
 
Through these interventions, her work encourages viewers to perceive the space in new ways and generates fresh narratives about the city and its environments. In the process, sensory perception and experience are expanded.

 “I explore the subtle unease and vibrations I feel in cities and spaces, paying attention to how these sensations shape our perception of space. In particular, I observe how physical elements such as floors, walls, and ceilings affect our perception and bodily experience.”   (Jinseon Ahn, Artist’s Note)

Jinseon Ahn graduated with a BFA in Sculpture from Sungshin Women’s University and is currently based in Seoul. She held her first solo exhibition, 《Throbbing, Moving, Stopped》, at Mueumsanbang, Seoul in 2023.
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《(non)Blind-Spot》 (PS CENTER, Seoul, 2025), 《Ringing Saga》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Piece of Us》 (Dohing Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Weaving Relations》 (Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Solid, Weak, Temple》 (Chamber, Seoul, 2023), 《Fluid Floor》 (Boloc, Seoul, 2022), and 《Plasticized Construction》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2021).

References

• 안진선, Jinseon Ahn (Artist Website)
• 서울시립미술관, [작품 설명] 길드는 서로들 (Seoul Museum of Art, [Artwork Description] Weaving Relations)
• 무음산방, [서문] 울렁거리고 움직이고 멈춘 (Mueumsanbang, [Preface] Throbbing, Moving, Stopped)
• 월간미술, 조현아 – 안진선 울렁거리고 움직이고 멈춘
• 챔버, [서문] Soild, Weak, Temple (Chamber, [Preface] Soild, Weak, Temple)
• 두산아트센터, [서문] Ringing Saga (DOOSAN Art Center, [Preface] Ringing Saga)