The Sands of Time: A Review of Dabin Ahn at Harper’s

In art school classrooms nationwide, teachers show their students grainy reproductions of Rene Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images,” in which the bumptious surrealist limned a photorealistic pipe over the inscription “This is not a pipe.” The concomitant ideological package—that images, especially painted ones, can never be faithful to their referents—has become so much a requisite part of our vernacular that it seems obvious. To most, that is. I imagine that if a similar exercise occurred at the School of the Art Institute some years ago, a fledgling Dabin Ahn, taken with the true implications of Magritte’s credo, would’ve asked eleventy probing questions. A seed was planted then. Its fruits are currently on view at Harper’s Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, where Ahn’s hermetic meticulousness provides a refreshing rejoinder to Chelsea’s cutthroat sell-or-be-sold mentality.

Ahn, who was born and raised in South Korea, has recently come into the spotlight for his trompe l’oeil depictions of the sort of porcelain sculptures his parents collected during his youth. The Harper’s show, however, moves further into Plato’s cave. Gone are the days of fussing over a painting until it truly fools viewers’ eyes. Ahn’s newest corpus, muted and schematic, is a kind of ideological meta-painting—images that are sharply aware of the perils of representation.

Sounds like a lot, right? Not for Ahn, who somehow tackles these existential questions with paintings that appear lightly worked and visually unambiguous. Take his two featured “Constellation” paintings, in which astral fireflies hum around porcelain vases painted with hasty floral illustrations. As still lifes, they’re equally distant from the visceral immediacy of the Northern Renaissance and the maddening inscrutability of Cézanne—in other words, vague in execution and calm in facture. But something’s off: impossibly, some fireflies have landed on the plants emblazoned onto the vessels, as if their branches extended off of the lustrous surface.

Here, Ahn renders with cold detachment a fundamental rupture in our perception of aesthetic objects. Unlike his fireflies, no matter how intimate a communion we feel with something beautiful, we’re always excluded from whatever paradise it presents to us. It’s a shortcoming worth weeping for, but Ahn’s paintings are exemplars of its necessity—if these utopias weren’t so inaccessible, they wouldn’t possess their spectacular power to redden our faces and churn our stomachs.

Ahn, discontent with probing our mere encounters with objects of beauty, also conducts fruitful forays into their pasts. Three visual motifs ground most of Ahn’s paintings at Harper’s: butterflies, potsherds and candles. Their employment in tandem with one another births a visual iconography as fertile as it is baffling. In “Twin Flame,” two butterflies—one real, one painted onto a potsherd—fly toward two candles on the canvas’s edge. “Good Things Take Time (2)” depicts a butterfly-adorned potsherd next to a lit candle. And “Good Things Take Time (3)” apposes a painting of a butterfly-adorned potsherd with an actual, three-dimensional incarnation of the same theme. These arrangements are as poignant as they are inscrutable, touching a deep part of the soul but refusing to disclose how.

Ahn’s signs become clearest in “Circle of Life,” where two paintings of potsherds—one decorated with a butterfly, the other with a candle that’s just been put out—surround a real potsherd emblazoned with a burning candle. Here, the symbols seem to be in Spinozan harmony—the here-and-now beauty of the butterflies; the half-forgotten past of the potsherds; and the bite-sized violence of the candle, which, as time passes, transmogrifies present beauty into the barely remembered past. Obviously, Ahn’s works themselves will one day fall victim to this inevitable slippage, and he knows it: these are offerings to the future, made sentimentally but without attachment. Head to Harper’s before their beauty becomes another blip in the sands of time—Charles Venkatesh Young