Young-Il Ahn

Korean-American artist Young-Il Ahn’s sublime abstractions draw inspiration from the artist’s lived experience of California, where he lived for over sixty years.Young-Il Ahn was born in Gaeseong, a city now geographically located in North Korea. As a young boy, Ahn moved with his family to Horikiri, northeast of Tokyo; in 1943, the Ahn family left Japan and returned to Korea when his father, artist Seung-gak Ahn, accepted a position as an art instructor at Cheongju Teachers College. A child prodigy, Ahn was awarded numerous prizes as a student, winning national art contests in both 1949 and 1954. After graduating from the highly competitive College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, serving in the military, Ahn eventually made his way to the United States, settling in Los Angeles in 1966.

During the five-plus decades Ahn lived in Los Angeles, the landscape, light, and atmosphere of California played a prominent role in his artwork. An avid fisherman, his painting practice was deeply affected when, in 1983, a motorboat he was operating became engulfed by fog off the Santa Monica coast. Unable to get his bearings, Ahn drifted on the Pacific Ocean; as he later recalled, “I lost all sense of direction. I cut the engine and let the currents take me.” When the fog finally cleared, Ahn’s experience of sunlight rippling on the waves was an epiphany: “I became profoundly aware of the surface of the sea being reborn in each and every moment.  What I witnessed was engraved deep in my heart. From that day on, the sea lived inside me and I became part of the sea.” Ahn’s Water series, his paintings of the fragmented colors of water in motion, would be an ongoing concern for the rest of his career, even as he painted other subjects and motifs.

In 2017–18, with the exhibition Unexpected Light: Works by Young-Il Ahn, Ahn had the distinction of being the first-ever Korean-American artist to be featured in a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, bringing overnight acclaim to his Water paintings. Ahn’s work was also the subject of two solo shows at the Long Beach Museum of Art, A Memoir of Water: Works by Young-Il Ahn in 2014, and Young-Il Ahn: When Sky Meets Water in 2017–18. Upon his death in 2020, ArtNews paid tribute to Ahn as a “trailblazing painter of radiant abstractions.”