Colors of L.A. are this painter’s muse
After a half-century of relative obscurity, a Korean artist whose work reflects his adopted home is being rediscovered
In the summer of 1983, artist Young-il Ahn set off in a rented dingy toward the horizon.
The painter frequently sought solace in the waters between Santa Monica and Catalina Island, taking only a fishing rod and sketchbook. That day, he was soon enveloped in fog so thick he couldn’t see an inch in any direction.
A crushing fear set in, and the fog felt like a heavy weight on his chest. He turned off the engine and left his fate to the waves.
Then in an instant, the ocean revealed itself in all its colors — like pearls of all shades scattered as far as the eye could see. In a moment at once rapturous and humbling, Ahn felt himself a part of the ocean, the ocean a part of him.
He’s been painting what he saw in that instant ever since, calling his evolving body of work
the “Water Series.” They are canvases of all sizes filled with meticulous square knife strokes that leap off the canvas like waves — at once still and dynamic, monochromatic and iridescent.
Now, at age 83, the Korean American artist is getting recognition after half a century of relative obscurity in his adopted home of Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is showcasing Ahn’s “Water Series” in its first solo exhibition of works by a Korean American artist, and on Friday, the Long Beach Museum of Art will open a 35-year retrospective of his paintings. High-profile galleries are featuring him in Seoul, where his works are in great demand.
The acclaim has changed little of Ahn’s days.
Today, as he has for decades, he sits in front of a canvas in his studio, a converted furniture factory near the 10 Freeway where the air is rich with the scent of spike lavender oil he uses to thin paint. He steadies the right hand impaired by a stroke, subtly tilts his head left and right like a bird, and takes his painting knife from palette to canvas, palette to canvas.
And once more the Pacific bubbles up before him.
Born in prewar North Korea, Ahn was a prodigious child who painted and drew throughout his childhood in Japan and South Korea.
He studied art at the nation’s premier Seoul National University. Art materials were so difficult to come by that he and other students resorted to cloth used to wrap dead bodies in lieu of canvases. Yet he always found a way to paint.
Ahn won national awards and was a darling among foreign collectors in postwar Seoul. Even so, he grew eager to get out from the shadow of his father, a painter and art professor.
He and a handful of artists left South Korea when it was still a dirt-poor nation that was mostly sending miners and nurses abroad to earn foreign currency.
“They came at a time when people would have asked, ‘What’s Korea? Where is Korea?’ ” said Virginia Moon, a curator at LACMA.
“They were rebels, these harabojis,” she said, using the Korean word for “grandpa.” “They came here to map their own ground.”
With an invitation from an American lawyer who had purchased one of his paintings, Ahn boarded a plane for Hawaii in 1966. After traveling in Hawaii and a brief stay in Laguna Beach, he went to New York, where a few of his compatriot artists had settled.
New York was exciting, but it wasn’t for Ahn. A lifelong fisherman, he relishes silence. After eight months, he came to Los Angeles, a place that would both inspire and entrance him, and serve as the backdrop to his darkest moments.
He rented an apartment in 1967 at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Spaulding Avenue, and took his paintings to the nearby row of galleries dotting La Cienega Boulevard. The first one he walked into, Zachary Waller, wanted to sign him to exclusively sell his works.
He thought he misunderstood because of his still elementary English. But the gallery was serious, and by the next day, his piece had already sold. He signed a 10-