Irip Ahn 안 이 립
@iripahn
iripahn@gmail.com







Q. How do you go about collecting the images that end up on your canvas?
A. When I wake up in the morning, I read through the domestic and international news outlets and various platforms I follow, and if an image catches my eye, I capture it. If I'm watching a film or a documentary and something unfamiliar flashes by, I save it as a short 3-to-5-second gif. I only have one criterion for collecting images: "it has to be impossible to explain why it caught my eye." If I can immediately explain why it was selected, I hit delete without hesitation. What I keep instead are the images I keep looking at without really knowing why, myself. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of these pile up in a single day, so the folder ends up in a state where things that don't belong together at all are jumbled together at random, a mythological figure next to a disaster photo, and next to that, someone's snapshot of an animal. At a glance it looks like dissonance, but finding a pair within it that somehow fits together and moving it onto the canvas is the very first step of the working process.


Q. Could you tell us how the world of your work came together?
A. Honestly, this is personal. I'm someone who's never been good at relationships. Growing up, I never really had the time to experience what family means, in a bodily, lived-in way. I think that's why I developed this habit of judging and filing people away too quickly, deciding this person is like this, this relationship is like that, and rushing to a conclusion. But real relationships were never meant to be sorted out that fast. So I wanted to do the opposite, at least in painting. Make it so no conclusion can be reached, so understanding doesn't come easily. The time a viewer spends standing in front of the canvas thinking "what is this, why are these things together," for me, that's a way of trying, inside the painting, something I was never able to do myself. Not rushing to define things. Just looking, for a while, at what isn't yet understood. Because the world moves too fast. That's what I want to say through painting.



Irip Ahn (b. 1990, Seoul) arranges heterogeneous material gathered through diverse channels across the canvas as though constructing a stage, pushing the tension of the picture plane to its limit. In his major series Invaded Terra, figures and presences rendered with deliberate formlessness act as devices that shatter any narrative center of gravity. In the process, the fractures produced where images of disparate origin meet generate a visual noise that resists smooth comprehension, drawing the viewer away from a figure-centered narrative reading and toward witnessing the unresolved, unsettled state that precedes the moment relationships and events congeal into meaning. All of this ultimately converges into a painterly inquiry into recovering the time before interpretation, a time lost to an era ruled by instant comprehension and classification.


Education
M.F.A Fine Art, Sejong University, Seoul, Korea
2021
True-Blue, Gallery Spectrum, Seoul

2020
The painting remained material, Gallery Roun, Seoul

2019
ONE'S LIFETIME, Can.verse 10G45, Seoul

2018
SURVIVAL: ISM, ARTWA, Seoul
Selected Group Exhibition
2018
HAUNTING BEAUTY, Artistrian, Seoul

2018
Fear : X, Indie Art Hall GONG, Seoul

2014
JW Young Art Award, Artspace H, Seoul

2014
The 5rd Artists of tomorrow Gyeomjae Jung Sun, GyeomjaeJeongseon Art Museum, Seoul

2012
HOTIST Curator's choice, Gana Art center, Seoul
Publications / Thesis
2014
A Study on the Representation of Absent Images through
Carnivalesque and Festival Mechanisms (Graduate School of Sejong University, Korea)
Awards
2014
4th JW Jung Young Art Award, JW Pharmaceutical Foundation, Seoul

2014
5th Tomorrow’s Artist Selection Geomjae Jeongseon Museum, GeomjaeJeongseon Art Museum, Seoul

Collections
Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in the Republic of Korea

Instagram
iripahn@gmail.com