NYAB Event - Jun Ahn "Self-Portrait"

Jun Ahn "Self-Portrait"

Kips Gallery

This event has ended.

Recently Jun Ahn was reviewed in the “British Journal of Photography” and “Artinfo", “Foreign Policy”. She was also selected by South China Morning Post as one of the five artists to watch in 2013.
Jun completed a BA in art history at the University of Southern California before going to New York to study photography at the Pratt Institute, flowed by studying at Parsons The New School for Design.
In her photographs, Ahn perches on the edges of rooftops in New York, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Sometimes she uses a harness; most of the time she does not. But the danger element of her work often overshadows its philosophical message. Ahn shares with us how the camera helps her to capture the invisible and how she has survived her dangerous photo shoots.
“it’s a kind of performance without an audience. There was a day when I recalled my adolescent years,” she explains. “I was sitting on the edge of my apartment in New York and looking over the cityscape. I had a thought that suddenly my youth was coming to an end and I could not figure out the future. I sat on the edge and looked down. Then I saw the empty space, the void, and there was a sudden change in my perspective on life and death, present and future. The vision of the cityscape I was witnessing was not real for that moment – I felt the illusion of beautiful buildings was just like the future, or an ideal that we can never reach, but which surrounds us. Then I looked down and saw that what I was actually standing on was empty space. It was ‘the present’ for me. So I took a picture of my feet and that was the start of my project.” I’m interested in photography’s ability to capture the invisible moment. The camera can see what our naked eye cannot. I wish to rebuild the hidden structure of the world, because I feel like it’s a dead moment if I don’t discover it. It will become a nothing moment because it has disappeared. I like to take a picture because it tells me that what you see is not everything -- there is always something beyond".