November 30th, 2023 –
January 7th, 2024 555W 25th St.New York, NY, 10001
AP SPACE Gallery is delighted to present "Absolute Space (No Longer in Time)", the first comprehensive retrospective of Korean artist Hyong Nam Ahn.
For over four decades, Hyong Nam Ahn bridged the gap between artist, sculptor, and inventor, playing a variety of different roles in the creation of a wide oeuvre. Ahn's center of gravity relies on the coexistence between pictorial flatness and sculptural condition. In an effort to blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the artist condenses forms, materials, and sources of light into unbounded, homogeneous entities that go far beyond being objects, almost feeling like earthly phenomena. Whether it is metal, neon, a stone, or a wire, at stake in Hyong Nam Ahn’s work is the activated space between artwork, environment, and viewer, the latest ascribed to a great participatory role. It is through this three-way interchange that Ahn conjures ideas of time and space, and explores the complex trinity through juxtapositions of natural materials with manmade construction.
Addressing together two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces by means of a fine sensitiveness and an elaborate formative system, the artist explores the possibilities of movement as a force and power that instills an endless process of growth within the work of art. This growth might be revealed through the spectator’s actions, linked to his movements, or it might grow itself from within, responding spontaneously to the environment. Thus Ahn’s practice, finding historical legitimacy in early examples of mechanized motion and in Kinetic Art, invites the spectator to activate the object’s dynamic presence and to cross the barrier between visible things and the unseen; between matter and energy; between words, sounds, colors; between the work of art and nature; between the work of art and the viewer.
Hyong Nam Ahn (b. 1955, Seoul, Korea) has worked chiefly in the USA for the past 40 years and has expressed the relationships among technology, human beings, and art in his works through varied concepts of figurativeness. The artist’s use of technology and industrial materials such as neon lights in combination with natural matters and motifs are more of a reference to the dichotomy of our environment that encompasses both the manmade and the natural rather than a critique on industrialization or consumerism. The various elements seem fractured yet balanced, engaging the viewer into a sophisticated dialogue about philosophy, nature, progress, technology, and spirituality.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Korean-USA relations was celebrated, he was selected to be the representative artist of South Korea together with Paik, Nam June.
