Artist Talk: Seongmin Ahn (MINHWA & minhwa)
In Collaboration with Kang Collection Korean Art
Date: To be announced
Gallery Korea, Korea Cultural Center (460 Park Ave 6th Floor, NYC)
© Courtesy of the artist
In this talk, contemporary minhwa painter Seongmin Ahn will discuss her creative practice in Asian traditional paintings, artistic background, immigration, and her philosophy. This program is part of the special exhibition, MINHWA & minhwa: Korean Folk Paintings in Dialogue With the Contemporary, celebrating the Asia Week New York. Seongmin Ahn will focus on how tradition became inspiration to her and the meaning of what she does in contemporary context along with her personal narratives and philosophy.
Her self-reflective narrative as an Asian immigrant artist with unique visual tools and perspective achieved by studying Asian traditional painting, plays an important role as well throughout the paintings. By revisiting and reinterpreting Asian Art history, and by combining ink painting and color painting tradition in one painting, as they were historically segregated, she pursues unification and balance, applying it to our current segregated situation between different classes, religions, nations, beliefs, and etc. She finds spirituality in physics and integrates it with her imaginative exploration into hyper dimensional thinking. This her own creative inner world was expressed in surrealistic charm.
Please visit here to learn more about the MINHWA & minhwa: Korean Folk Paintings in Dialogue With the Contemporary exhibition
© Courtesy of the artist
About the artist
Seongmin Ahn received a BFA and MFA in Asian traditional painting from Seoul National University and a second MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. With practical experience and a deep understanding of tradition, her work takes Asian traditional painting as a starting point and transforms it into something experimental with her own interpretation, bridging tradition and modern, and East and West.
Ahn has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (Wilmington, DE), Queens College Art Center (Flushing, NY), and Charles B. Wang Center (Stony Brook, NY). She is a two-time grant recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the first prize winner of Visual Art Competition from the AHL Foundation, and has been reviewed in The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NY Arts magazine, The Baltimore Sun, The Plain Dealer and others. Ahn has also taught Asian traditional painting at various institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queens Museum, and the Art Students League of New York.