Ahn Sung Kyu

Korean Contemporary Art by Ahn Sung Kyu - Venice at Dawn

2023

Ahn Sung Kyu is a Korean artist born in 1966 who lives and works in Daejeon, South Korea. Sung-Kyu is an artist who has intensively focused on painterly space and visual structure through his work. From the “Monument” series he focused on 10 years ago to today’s “Border” series, Ahn’s works reveal vividly realistic forms. However, the emphasis was rather on the experiments and questions about the visual structure in the space of painting, and on reflections on the visual frame. In the “Border” series also, featured in this exhibition, Ahn Sung-Gyu composes the picture-plane not with the standard composition of 5:3, but with a proportion of 9:1 between the sky and structures on the ground, drawing viewers’ eyes toward the border dividing the two areas, and creating extreme tension. Furthermore, he produces a rather unfamiliar picture-plane, quite different from ordinary landscape paintings, by reaching towards the limits of tension with hyper-realistic dense description. But such tension and visual focus are soon restored to a wide pictorial space that eases visual the tension, and then enables us to get closer to the significance of the borders of visual tension. Here, the space created by the artist can be read as a point of self-awareness about the borders of perception looking at the present era, and a frame through which to see the world. As seen in his delicate depiction of buildings, while minutely observing the limits of the smallest parts, Ahn Sung-Gyu sometimes reveals the boundary of perspective approaching exactness and extremity paradoxically through an extreme contrast between the architectural structures and the opposing areas, and in other times he manipulates and uncovers the limits of the observer through breaking away from natural hues and achieving visual alterations in certain frames of the window-like canvases. Such limitations are on one hand, a perception of the limits of the artist himself, but on the other hand, a statement about the essential limits of humans. Thus, Ahn’s paintings cannot be read merely as simple landscapes. Considering that such mechanism is established structurally in the picture-plane, it is necessary to turn our eyes to the significance of the painting space, and therefore his works make us feel the need to appreciate them in terms of the visual and sentimental aspects as well as the significance of the narrative structure brought by the tension of the picture-plane. (Text by Lee Seung Hun, Director of CyArt Institute)