Experts describe the psyche as a combination of conscious and unconscious materials, which combine seamlessly to create our sense of self and the reality around us. Artist Dabin Ahn’s compositions exemplify this process: psychological and emotional interior landscapes are shaped through multimedia paintings that reflect the layered and ambiguous construction of subjectivity.
Ahn’s latest offering, “Soft music“, which recently opened at Chicago’s DOCUMENT, represents a major evolution in the artist’s practice. In just a few years, his work has undergone a gradual refinement of his symbolic language, with an increasing sense of world-building that now extends beyond painting as a single medium. “I think less about the physicality or materials and more about how to bring emotion to them,” Ahn tells Observer, sharing how he maintains a close physical connection with each work, carefully crafting each element. “My process is very intimate. I often hold the work while painting, almost as if I’m holding it. “There is a feeling of closeness from the beginning.”
Although he comes from a traditional painting background, he began to feel limited to oil on canvas alone. He constructs his own frames and panels, shaping them beyond the edge of the canvas and adding other elements that expand each composition into the physical space. “This process evolved: some frames remained traditional, others extended the edges, opening the image outward. Gradually, the work transformed visually,” Ahn recounts. More recently, the scale has become mostly life-sized – not miniature, not huge, but in keeping with real objects and lived sensations.
During our conversation, Ahn identified a major turning point—his father’s illness and death—that profoundly affected his emotional state, and thus his work. As often happens, grief became a catalyst for artistic creativity, began to transform visually and materially, and adopted more experimental methods of expressing increasingly complex emotional states. “His illness gradually worsened, and of course it affected my practice. I was emotionally charged whenever I did something,” Ahn explains. “The work became more experimental because I was looking for ways to more fully portray my emotional state.”
This is demonstrated in the exhibition through the presentation of digital media, elegantly integrated within the canvas itself The four seasonsto expand her story. “Video allows me to express emotional states more fully, especially after my father’s death,” he says. “Drawing remains central, but I needed something more.” Showing fragments of videos recorded by the artist over three years of travel and daily life, the work moves forward and then backwards in an endless cycle, finding in the passage of time and events a value that transcends any illusion of a consequential ending. It is a powerful metaphor for what it means to hold and move through time.
Although Ahn’s work remains predominantly symbolic, it is strongly influenced by the dimension of the unconscious which allows him to offer elegies about the meaning of life. The video element seems to allow for a form of surrender to its non-consequential flow, pushing Anne beyond the self-contained image, and opening the work into a more expansive narrative field. At the same time, fragmentation, residue and interruptions are integral to the structure of his work. Ahn’s lexicon is now one of the remnants of everyday life – the ceramic vessels, stones, candles and personal effects that accompany the fleeting nature of everyday moments – shown here broken or hanging. “It carries an unknown history, and that mystery fascinates me,” he says, adding that he has a deep interest in how fragments survive, like artifacts in museums.
“I became more interested in fragmentation and questioning what constitutes the ‘whole’. “I relate this to life — how things wear out or fall apart over time,” Ahn says. Coming from the still life tradition, his earlier works focused on perfect, flawless objects. Now, this quiet, serene perfection seems like an illusion that can’t really exist, even on canvas. “At the time, my life was simpler, and I didn’t encounter much turmoil, but as I encountered more complexity, the parts started to make sense visually and conceptually. They fit in with what I’m trying to express.”
However, there is also a constant attempt to reassemble these fragments into a precarious whole. His works suggest a fragile balance, something temporary, always on the verge of dissolving. Both in their structure and in their symbolic vocabulary, they recall a tradition Vanitasin the face of the transience and transience that characterize human existence. Decorations such as butterflies and dimly lit white candles make this idea of transience clear. In fact, most elements in his work remain intentionally legible, without hidden symbolism. “They are everyday things that open up to broader existential meanings,” Ahn explains.
Most importantly, Ahn does not make the sentiment clear. Instead, he operates at the threshold where emotion has already become a symbol. Its material fragments, embedded in these assemblages of free association, function as interfaces between physical feeling and symbolic form—metaphorical portals through which inner language can be approached.
As the title also suggests, these works often inhabit transitional moments: twilight, nightfall, or sunrise, in suspended atmospheres that further enhance the elegiac symbolism of impermanence. “I experience time through my studio routine—watching the sunset, then the moonrise while working late at night. Nighttime provides a quieter, more introspective space,” Ahn shares. Each work becomes for him a condensed version of his studio environment – his memories, his mentality and his surroundings. “It’s dense stuff that captures that experience.” They are portals to the subconscious and, at the same time, physical embodiments of it, crystallizing for a moment within a relentless emotional flow.
Ultimately, his works emerge from a constant balance between control and surrender. Images appear in his mind and are transferred to the canvas, where the emotional impressions find symbolic form, but the structural and handcrafted elements require careful planning and execution to cohere within the whole. “Some aspects have been planned, especially the structural elements, but much of the process is intuitive,” he explains. “I rarely end up with something identical to my initial idea, but I usually prefer what emerges through the process. I start by building the canvas in my woodshop, setting the scale first. Then I move through the layers – background, objects, or abstraction. I control, but I also collaborate with the materials.”
Looking to the future, Ahn expresses his desire to expand his artistic language by incorporating new materials while keeping drawing as its core. For him, this expansion represented a form of linguistic growth, aimed at fostering deeper connections with audiences. “It’s like becoming a polyglot, every subject expands my vocabulary,” he says. He admits that he is still processing his father’s death and that it will continue to shape the work, while also hoping that over time, this pain may gradually give way to something else.
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