Seongmin AHN

Seongmin Ahn: Between Memory, Identity, and the Infinite Space of Books and Flowers

For more than two decades, Seongmin Ahn has lived and worked in New York, where her identity as a Korean artist meets the city’s multicultural fabric. “In this city where over 400 languages are spoken,” she says, “my life became a visual diary, shaped by coexistence, fusion, and the unexpected.” Her work is rooted in this lived experience — not abstracted from reality, but anchored in it: breathing, evolving, responding.

Two motifs — peonies and bookshelves — return across her oeuvre, laden with intimate meaning. Peonies, for Ahn, are not just decorative. “They remind me of my mother. She grew them in our garden. They’re a symbol of love, time, memory.” In her Peony Bouquet installations and paintings, the flower bursts forth in bold color, often suspended in space. Its exuberance contrasts with the stillness around it, evoking moments of emotion too large for words.

Bookshelves, on the other hand, speak to Ahn’s conceptual grounding and intellectual curiosity. Her Hyper-Dimension Within series, first shown in Paris and Seoul, features repeated arrangements of books, verging on the monotonous — a reflection, she says, of “the beauty I found and amplified in the streets of old bookstores.” These shelves are both ordered and overflowing, leaking light and water, and suggesting time, memory, or even loss. “The shelf is an image of knowledge, but also of erasure,” she notes.

Trained in traditional ink painting in Seoul, and later in conceptual and minimalist art in the U.S., Ahn never set out to “look different.” Working with Korean painting in New York already made her different. Her concern was never style, but story. “All my paintings begin with ‘me’. My work is a visual conversation — the story I want to tell, the message I want to suggest.” Minhwa, the Korean folk art tradition, is a resource, not a genre she imitates. “We all look at the same Minhwa, but there’s only one me.”

This idea — that creativity lies in content, not appearance — underpins Ahn’s approach. She uses Minhwa’s symbolic forms and visual language as a vessel to carry contemporary, personal, and even speculative narratives. Her paintings, with their voids, waves, books, and blossoms, are contemplative worlds — rich in metaphor, open to interpretation.

Ahn’s technique remains rooted in traditional materials: ink, mineral pigments, and hanji (mulberry paper). But the spirit of her art is forward-looking. As she says: “You have to see everything — modern art, film, design, architecture. Understanding both history and the present is essential if we are to reinterpret folk painting in a way that truly belongs to today.”