soryun ahn
The Lives of Drifters
Flow through life’s contradictions with oil painter, Soryun Ahn.
Soryun Ahn
The Lives of Drifters
Flow through life’s contradictions with oil painter, Soryun Ahn.
Soryun Ahn adored the way novels, films, and paintings could transcend languages and cultural boundaries, “profoundly and inexplicably resonating with a young girl living in a small nation in the East.” While going on to meet individuals and consume rich narrative traditions across borders in the United States and Eastern Europe, mobility has empowered Soryun to look at herself from afar and reflect upon where she stands with greater sensitivity.
The figures that appear in works such as “The Melancholy of the Beast” or “The Angel on the Street” manifest as human-beast hybrids, embodying contradictory elements and revealing an unsettling sense of indefinable ambiguity. Those like the woman depicted in “The Wild (I)” appear to float, untethered to the ground with a vague shadow that appears to wander forward aimlessly yet incessantly. Like Soryun, she drifts between spaces, never fully belonging and constantly walking a tightrope along the faults where disparate worlds meet and often collide. These are beings that reject interpretations within conventional frameworks of meaning, powering on autonomously in search of their own significance in this world.
Soryun’s charcoal sketches often act as preliminary studies for more expansive oil paintings, ideal for converting fleeting thoughts and sentiments into visual form. Completed on occasion with a swift, single brushstroke, and at times requiring the meticulous layering of multiple coats, her oil paintings reinforce the complexity and uncertainty of Soryun’s life. Like a visual ethnographer who begins to inhabit the lived experiences of others on an intersubjective level, the irregular rhythms and coexistence of sharp bursts and elongated processes create imaginative possibilities for viewers to momentarily envision alternative contexts, and anchor their everyday lives in the illuminating medium of art.
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Discover more of Soryun’s works in Issue 5 of our magazine!
