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Wooson Gallery, one of Korea's notable galleries, is presenting the works of their chosen artist in the Insights sector of Art Basel Hong Kong 2023.
Their choice is Ahn Chang Hong.
Below is a description of Ahn Chang Hong's art world provided by Wooson Gallery.
Ahn Chang Hong’s project titled Not a Flower, But a Flower presented at the Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 Insights sector came into being as a result of what has developed for high school when he had a dream of becoming a painter. Back in those days, he was fully committed to the belief that the path of being an artist was seeing and accepting various values he had pursued throughout his life, and deeply contemplating them.
The Amaranth Garden series, which is more than 4m wide, is the main piece in this project. It is the fruit of Amaranth borne out of Salvia Flowerbed in 1971. Ahn’s art is almost like a creative evolution of curiosity. The process where his work is expanded in a way where a part of his previous work is put forth in a new era, growing into a concept and expanding the horizons, thereby coming into being as series. A very realistic pictoriality is spotlighted as pointillistic expressions added to his perspective that used to be based on the previous freewheeling grotesque aesthetics. His works are embedded with mundane matters overwhelming people’s inner thoughts, the journey of life, and the process of generation and extinction. They also represent all the existential things that disappear in the eternity of time. Ahn has strived to incorporate the images of this era into the medium of ‘Amaranth’ with his ego integrated inside. He created a space beyond the realm of flat painting through intensive work.
The Amaranth flowers in Amaranth Garden show their struggling survival of interwoven wild grass in the Amaranth flower bend by standing provocatively upright, being broken, and fallen down after a storm, blooming or withering away, which is a scene of the garden he created in front of his studio. Ahn must have seen the struggles of humans in the fierce survival race in the wild which is gruesome with the overlaps of the horrors and brutality of the world, and their fierce battle for survival.
Ahn wanted to tell the story of living a life in this world through the flower of ‘Amaranth’. Having discovered the desperation, cruelty, creation, and extinction of flowers that bloom and fall, he expresses the world we live in through the Amaranth, which has withered away desperately.
He did not try to paint a beautiful painting; he simply tried to get into the essence of nature. The way he unfolded the garden on canvas is not just for a landscape painting. The garden he created is the world we live in, and the Amaranth manifests how we live our lives.
Looking closely at his Amaranth Garden, Ahn seems to be quietly reciting that the flowers that fell in the storm did not die, but just curled up in the severe storm. Ahn hid the light of hope in the Amaranth, believing that the Amaranth in devastation is not dead but has overcome the storm. I dream of greater vibrancy and warmth in the heart of the mankind frozen by the pandemic after the spring, upon looking at Ahn Chang Hong’s Amaranth.
