Expositions passées

안창홍 : 이름도 없는

2019 GAM Highlighting Artists of Gyeongnam

Ahn Chang Hong : Sad Evaporation

 

Exhibition Period September 5 – December 4, 2019

Venue Exhibition Rooms 1 & 2, Gyeongnam Art Museum

 

The Gyeongnam Art Museum has carried out the annual program “Highlighting Artists of Gyeongnam” to promote a focus on artists from the region. This year, the Museum will hold Ahn Chang Hong: Sad Evaporation, to illuminate artist Ahn Chang Hong’s (1953- ) recent world of art. Born in Miryang, Ahn is a first-generation Minjung artist who has gained an especially significant presence on the Korean art scene with his sharp observations of our society and his peculiar manners of expression. “Without Name,” used as the title for the exhibition as well as a painting series by the artist, signifies persons who have been alienated from our society, and those who have been sacrificed and have disappeared in the course of history. It has also been a key theme for the artist’s work over the past four decades or so.

 

Ahn Chang Hong began his art at an early age, but refused institutional art education including college, with the result that he built a unique style. Ahn presented works such as Family Photos, capturing his personal tragic family history as part of history as a whole; Dangerous Game, dealing with human violence and loss of humanity; and Bird, portraying the democratization movement and reality of the military dictatorship, during the period from the late 1970s to 80s, and took part in Reality and Utterance, a group at the center of Minjung art at the time. His activities then caused many to perceive him as a Minjung artist; however, unlike the other artists who addressed grand discourse such as modern/contemporary history of Korea, through mainly realistic and narrative methods of expression, Ahn preferred to tell the stories of the times and situations through his personal life. Particularly focusing on the weak and minorities, Ahn has presented diverse series on women, men, drag queens, youth and love, portraying capitalist society's dark realities through his works since the 1990s. In the 2000 decade, he continued to extend his personal history to the history of the times and society through major painting series such as Meditation of the 49 and The Spring Day Passes, based on faded photographs, and Bed Couch, consisting of nude paintings of ordinary people around him.

 

Having pursued a dynamic formative world that includes not just painting, but also photography, drawing and sculpture, Ahn Chang Hong has recently been focusing on reliefs and gigantic three-dimensional works, based on the motif of giant masks. Since the 1980s, the artist has made diverse attempts in the area of 3D, such as small works made of terra cotta and pieces of wood. His passion for such work seems more intense since 2016. At first glance the transformation from painting to sculpture appears to be a drastic change in form; however, Ahn’s three-dimensional works are in fact paintings on face-shaped structures made with FRP (fiber-reinforced plastic), and are an extension of his painting, merely moving from canvas to 3D. Particularly the images of masks and the covered or hollowed-out eyes are in a similar context to the artist’s expressions of human figures in his paintings. The portraits, which have acquired a sense of volume and space as they were transferred from the two-dimensional picture-plane to the third dimension, go on to become not just portraits of certain individuals, but a collective group portrait, more painfully revealing the contradictions of our society, where our eyes are open, yet we cannot see the truth amidst the unreasonable reality.

 

Through this exhibition, the Gyeongnam Art Museum seeks to illuminate and carry out academic research on artist Ahn Chang Hong’s recent world of art, including the sculptures mentioned above. The exhibition will feature more than 130 paintings, reliefs and large-scape sculptures, including some made newly for this show. It will be Ahn's first solo exhibition to be held in a national/public museum since his solo show at the Busan Museum of Art in 2009, ten years ago, and the first large-scale showcase of the artist’s work to take place in his hometown, where he spent his childhood—the happiest years of his life. Ahn’s works have been shown as diverse series from the 1970s until today, but always at the base has been his gaze toward those who are alienated from our society, and those sacrificed in the turmoils of history. Through the works of Ahn Chang Hong, who has consistently told stories about these people for more than four decades, we hope viewers will be given the opportunity to think again about the times and the reality we live in.