When I encountered Sanghoon Ahn’s paintings for this first time last July at the MMCA Residency Goyang, they seemed at first to fall into the “abstract art” category that we often see these days, but it took a bit of time to observe his characteristics and familiarize myself with his work. As I spent two or three hours observing and acquainting myself with his paintings, my eyes went to the marks indicating that the canvas had been rotated a few times from top to bottom and from left to right, to the repeated use of colors and brushstrokes, and to the text written over top of the image. Even though there was no overall concrete object of representation (that could be discerned), the canvas as a whole was filled with a variety of colors and brushstrokes along with alphabetical writing. But what really started me thinking about what Sanghoon Ahn’s paintings were doing was the comparison with exhibitions I saw from other painters around the same time after visiting his studio.

Recent paintings that have been described as “abstract” appear to combine 20th century references with certain contemporary perceptions. While it’s clear that many artists are conscious of or interested in 20th century references, they are also free from the painting norms of the 20th century, creating gestures based on their own individual subjectivity and senses rather than the slogans of painting at the time. Around the same time that I visited Sanghoon Ahn’s studio, I saw an exhibition by another artist who painted landscapes, but in a way that deconstructed them to the point of unrecognizability, filling the canvas completely with dynamic brushwork, and another by a third artist who covered the canvas in brilliant color planes, but creates a cheerful effect with the addition of geometric figures and playful, cartoonish brushstrokes. While their work cannot be uniformly defined as “abstract,” they unquestionably distanced themselves from representation as they deconstructed their object or placed greater emphasis on senses and expression. Sanghoon Ahn likewise had canvases with no concrete object of reference, filling them with irregular brushstrokes—but this sort of painting work, with its focus on canvas composition or pictorial autonomy, was already the province of the 20th century references. Today, we have passed through those references and stand on the runway of the 21st century, free to enjoy everything without the criticisms that the 20th century faced.¹⁾ At the same time, we must also constantly ask ourselves what we are doing that is “new.” This question is predicated on the idea that the concept of “newness” must be something that is diametrically opposed to the past or capable of taking its place.It also incorporates a sense of skepticism, and the idea that nothing we do is new anymore amid a flood of “retro.” Yet in his analysis of the “newness” concept from a socioeconomic perspective, Boris Groys shared a different idea. He argued that there was “nothing more traditional than an orientation to the new,” that questions about the new should be replaced with questions about value, that innovation arises only as a result of cultural values being inverted, and that because “newness” follows the economic logic of contemporary society, even the attitude of seeking to remain in the past can be valorized as “newness.” ²⁾ From his perspective, the “newness” in today’s painting is a matter of upraising in terms of the inversion of cultural values. Groys argues that the artist (author) is given over completely to cultural economic logic, which would mean that we are living in a society where a phenomenon of cultural value appreciating as a result of “retro” is taking place throughout our culture and economy. At the same time, he maintained that the artist as medium in innovative exchange must choose their own individual strategy, and that even if they master cultural norms, “every human being necessarily makes a personal, and thus partially profane, interpretation of that norm.”³⁾ In terms of painting, this means that it is important to consider what personal interpretations and choices individual artists make within (some) pictorial strategies in a contemporary era described as a “resummoning of abstraction.”

Exhibition view of 《On special days, we need a story- not to wait alone, to remain forgotten》, (Gallery Chosun, 2020). Image Provided by MMCA Residency Goyang

This leads me to consider the identity of a certain strangeness I detected beyond the various characteristics I observed on the canvases when I first encountered Sanghoon Ahn’s work at the MMCA Residency Goyang. Filled with multiple colors and brilliant brushstrokes, his canvases seemed at first like vessels containing a mixture of many ingredients. The more I looked, however, I saw that his images were accustomed to a wider surface than the defined dimensions of the trimmed canvas—that they did not feel comfortably “settled” within the frame. Like the mathematical concept of a surface being definite as an infinite plane in space rather than a plane of finite size, the plane posited by his paintings seemed as though it could be expanded into the world beyond the frame. Indeed, an examination of the work done by the artist at the Incheon Art Platform, the Gyeonggi Creation Center, the Culture Tank, and elsewhere shows that his body and senses are accustomed to painting with an exhibition setting’s walls, floors, and exterior surfaces as his surface. His frequent use of a transparent plastic curtain as a support in place of a canvas may represent a strategy in which the very world showing through the clear surface serves as his pictorial “stand.” His paintings exist as images that draw a strength within space—one that pushes and pulls in all directions; they may bend, curve, and flutter. They also free themselves from the norms of two-dimensionality. Acquiring spatial flexibility and expandability, the artist’s gestures presume spatial volume even within a canvas of defined size as he begins to apply his brushstrokes. Like a vector in space, his strokes may penetrate the canvas itself or transect it obliquely. The reason it appears to be a single surface owes to the limits of visual perception, and the fact that the canvas must be seen from a single direction—head on.

Ahn also selects the titles of his works from sentences he finds through Google searches. He has explained that this Googling merely introduces contingency or a number of outcomes to his work, rather than serving as a clue to interpret the image. But a few of the paintings that I saw in his studio last July included sentences such as “More Was Not Necessary,” “FORGOTTEN PLACES,” and “ADD TO CART,” and were clearly introducing language as a pictorial element. Even when they are intermixed with other painting components and not immediately decipherable, the words and sentences that the viewer takes in become imprinted on the brain and cannot be separated from the image—even if they are not necessarily clues for image interpretation. Just as the artist has often overlapped images using spaces and environments as his surface, so this appears to be an act of projecting images onto the world of language. The sentences in the images may be chosen randomly through Googling, but they possess denotative meaning as language, and the image must coexist with them as it overlaps with or seeks to escape the meaning indicated by the words. In effect, the painters are neither subordinated to nor rendered independent from language.

For a long time, painting has sought its independence from architecture; heading into the 21st century, it has tried to distance itself from narrative and representation, or to not be illusion. If any of the painters of the 21st century are seeking out ways of helping painting escape somewhere else—and if Sanghoon Ahn is included among them—then his personal strategy right now seems to involve overlapping painting with world-as-space as he guides us to view the image.

1)For example, Clement Greenberg, in his essay “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962), coined the term “homeless representation” to critique the irony in abstract painting work by artists such as Willem de Kooning, whose images he saw as awaiting the appearance of a representational subject through their illusions and depiction. (Hal Foster, Art Since 1990, Korean trans. Suhee Bae et al. [Seoul: Semicolon, 2007], 439).
2)Boris Groys, 『On the New』 (London: Verso, 2014).
2)Ibid., 191.

※ This content was first published in 『2020 MMCA Residency Goyang: A Collection of Critical Reviews』, and re-published here with the consent of MMCA Goyang Residency

Lee Sunghui / Curator

Lee Sunghui is currently a curator for HITE Collection. She received her BFA in the Department of Industrial Design at KAIST, and a BFA and MFA in the Department of Art Theory from Korea National University of Arts. She is a recipient of the 2nd Artsonje Open Call.