Young-Il Ahn’s Water BLMV 18, 2018 is a late work from the artist’s celebrated Water series in which the artist explored the refractory qualities of water.
The series was inspired by Ahn’s life-changing experience in 1983 of being lost at sea. An avid fisherman, his painting practice was forever changed when a motorboat he was operating became engulfed by fog off the Santa Monica coast. Unable to get his bearings, Ahn drifted on the Pacific Ocean; as he later recalled, “I lost all sense of direction. I cut the engine and let the currents take me.” When the fog cleared, his experience of sunlight rippling on the waves became the inspiration for his abstract Water paintings: “I became profoundly aware of the surface of the sea being reborn in each and every moment. What I witnessed was engraved deep in my heart. From that day on, the sea lived inside me and I became part of the sea.” For Ahn, painting water became an ongoing project: “To contain variations of so many kinds of roiling water under the sunlight on a canvas, I painted and painted and could not stop.”
Born in Korea in 1934, Ahn attended the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. In 1966 he moved to Los Angeles where he lived and worked until his death in 2020. Ahn’s Water paintings were the subject of a solo exhibition at LACMA in 2017—the first one-person presentation at the museum to feature a Korean-American artist.