DabinAhn
Dabin Ahn (b. 1988) is an artist based in Chicago. He received a BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute in 2016 and an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute in 2020.
memory/
Memory is the backbone of my recent practice.
My parents were an early influence on my artistic journey. They were both in the arts—my father is an actor and my mother is a sculptor. It felt very natural for me to pursue a path in the arts.
I moved to the US to study when I was 12, so I’ve spent the majority of my life away from my parents and Korea. Physically, I can’t be further away from them, since Korea is on the other side of the world from Chicago. As I reflect on my childhood as an adult, my memories feel hazy and I tend to focus on the good ones. These memories feel like the flame of a candle: immaterial, fleeting, and lacking crisp definition.
Unfortunately during the pandemic, my parents were diagnosed with new health conditions. Since I now live in Chicago and cannot travel back to Korea frequently, I can only support them from afar. In grad school, I made fun sculptural and two-dimensional works, but after I learned about my dad’s health condition, my work naturally shifted. For the first time in my life, I’m thinking a lot about memory and the passage of time. I’ve learned that some things that once seemed permanent are actually fleeting. I began referencing objects that feel ephemeral or magical, such as candles, ceramic vessels, and insects.
line/
I love looking at objects with history, and I pull and fuse references to create my own motifs. I think it has been more successful in my recent paintings. Many of my motifs come directly from Korean vessels and painters who depicted insects. I fell in love with a small body of work by Shin Saimdang, who was one of the few female painters in Korea during the Joseon Dynasty. She painted delicate, life-size arrangements of plants and insects.
My references to traditional Korean vessels come from the National Museum of Korea. I’m thankful for all of the work that they have done over the years to photograph and organize their collections. I still have 100,000 images that I haven’t even accessed yet, so I know this is a body of work I could continue almost indefinitely.
color/
I have used desaturated and muted tones throughout my entire career. I have color blindness, and I learned that I could not properly see or replicate colors when I began making art as a teenager. It became more of a struggle in college when we had to paint still lifes and were instructed to accurately depict the color, light, form, and scale of a real-life object. What I thought was accurate was completely wrong. That was an embarrassing moment for me and made me pretty self-conscious about color.
I’m much more comfortable now in my own studio practice because I can select colors that I can see well. The good thing about having this limited palette is that when I introduce bright colors to my paintings, such as yellow, they become the focal point and have a strong visual impact. I like to selectively use vibrant colors as a tool to guide the viewer’s eyes.
My paintings all share a base color. The base color serves as the seamless background color and the palette is developed out of branches and variations of that main color. If I tone my painting with a warm gray and paint a vessel in front of it, I add additional colors to the leftover paint from the background for the vessel. It’s like adding water to water rather than adding oil to water. It helps the painting feel cohesive and unified in its palette.
As a young artist, I didn’t recognize the importance of craftsmanship. I was only really interested in the end result. Three years ago, I got a studio for the first time, which freed me to use power tools and work with wood. I started experimenting with building stretchers from scratch. I started making my stretchers, stretching canvases, priming, painting, and framing all on my own. If I went to an art supplies store, I could buy a canvas and start a new painting in 20 minutes. It takes me almost a full day to cut wood, build stretchers, stretch the canvas, and prime. This process already puts me into a relationship with this object I built. I don’t want to waste it by painting something that I don’t appreciate. Therefore, I spend a lot of time digitally sketching and mocking up what I want to put down on the canvas; it takes longer than the painting itself.
I started painting the sides of the canvas because I couldn’t ignore them while building my own materials. It’s just enough space to utilize. I’m always inspired by the three-dimensionality of the canvas. When I build stretchers, each painting has a unique depth. The typical taper candle is about an inch wide, so my stretchers are built slightly wider than the candle. Whenever I paint candles, I paint them at a life-size scale, which I think puts the viewer into an interesting relationship with the image.
Images courtesy of the artist.