Johyun Gallery, Busan, is pleased to present 27 works of Ahn Doo-Jin, who has been attracting the interests of the Korean art world by finding his own artistic theory and implementing such a concept to his paintings and installations.
As a university student, Ahn began to question the minimum unit of images. Under the hypothesis that images have minimum units as matter has minimum units, he established the concept of imaquark. An imaquark is a minimum unit of an image Ahn formulated himself. It is a compound word of “ima-,” taken from the word “image,” and “quark,” the smallest unit of matter. Ultimately, Ahn’s work is a journey of creating a world of formative art, focusing on an organic process where new associations are born from an accumulation of minimum units of images.
In order to demonstrate the indefinite potentials of imaquarks, the artist continues to pursue painterly experiments. His previous work has revealed the developmental process of a painting conceived from a state of a wonhyung, an original form, composed of imaquarks (the concept of a wonhyung -> the linguistic properties of the conflicts and collisions intrinsic to a wonhyung -> building a nonlinear narrative of a painting through the tense relations of painterly elements and patterns -> the study of a development of a painting from certain conditions through such processes). In the current exhibition, A Stone, Ahn attempts to create a painting itself through experiments of the developmental process of a painting. From a developmental aspect, a painting is composed of different layers of elements, patterns, structures and ambiguity. Each element creates patterns by forming relations to stacking, dividing, mixing, drawing, energy and flatness. Through the mixture of these patterns, the abstractness simulates forms and becomes a threshold of forming a landscape. Although his paintings evoke images of landscapes, they are not landscapes but the beginnings of the developments of the paintings–the births of the paintings themselves.
A painting is similar to the inner structure of natural objects as it is the product of complexity of relations and patterns. Approaching a painting, much alike natural objects, from a developmental aspect could indicate that the inner structure of a painting follows the law of nature.
There are three types of stones appearing in Ahn’s current series. They can be largely categorized as a moving stone, growing stone and subdividing stone. These are the stones that arise from the surroundings conceived by a mixture of patterns after removing decorative elements and narratives from Ahn’s previous series. First, these stones disregard size. They are big like rocks and round like small stones. Regardless of size, the shapes of the stones exist by the presence of their weights only, eliminating the significations of stones and rocks. Second, there are movements. Rooted heaviness of rocks does not allow any movement. By enabling the stones to move on their own, the rupturing sounds of the fractures forged by the “heaviness–unpermitted movement” generate meanings. Third, the stones grow. These stones are not just objects anymore and they are no longer mere matter that are molded by their environments only–there are no changes in their appearances other than the effects of weathering.
They grow like plants and subdivides as in asexual reproduction. These three types of stones serve the following roles: (1) the tense relation of patterns and collisions–a moving stone, (2) the beginning of a
landscape–an association that emerges from conflicts of abstractness, and (3) a painting that expresses itself metaphorically as stones–a circulating metaphor. Through these three roles, the stones will reveal the evolutionary forms of self developing paintings, penetrating through the net of relations of the patterns created by various elements.
Ahn’s work reveals the traces of how he studies and contemplates between the philosophical nature of art itself and the endless duty as an artist to present visually. Through the works of Ahn, which offer an original and provocative point of view, we hope to reflect the current address of Korean contemporary art and its future potentials.
