Korean painter Ahn Chang Hong turns to cast iron and daguerreotypes to unmask Paradise

On the ground floor of Ahn Chang Hong’s new exhibition stands a head nearly three metres tall, cast in iron and gone the colour of rust, with a bomb driven through its face. The fins point at the ceiling; the nose cone has buried itself where an eye should be. The piece is called Blindness – War, and it is the Korean painter’s first sculpture in cast iron, chosen by an artist who has spent more than four decades refusing to forgive the violence modern societies file under progress.

Paradise, at Arario Gallery Seoul, wears its title as an accusation. The gallery frames the word as irony: a name for the order and calm of mainstream society, and for the brutality and absurdity that calm keeps out of sight. That has always been Ahn’s territory. His work looks at what civilisation hides or excuses in its own name, at the people pushed to the margins or made to keep quiet, and at the slow erosion of the human under modern capitalism.

The second departure is quieter and stranger. In Paradise – Face and Paradise – Hand, Ahn paints over pigment prints of photographs made by the daguerreotypist Park Seoungil, using the silver-plate process that gave photography its start in 1839. A grey, mask-like face floats in a black field, a bullet hole punched through one eye and cracks spreading outward as if across a windscreen; a pair of hands rises in a gesture caught between prayer and surrender. The slowest kind of photograph is put to work recording damage.

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The canvas that gives the show its name is its largest work, a mixed-media panel more than four metres wide. At first it reads as darkness. Then the shapes resolve into a heap of pale, spotted animals, piled on one another and spattered with red, while small yellow butterflies drift across the surface like a decoration someone forgot to remove. Nearby hang panels from noon-mool, the Korean word for tears: photographs of birds laid out lifeless behind wire netting, flooded in acid yellow-green paint.

That series also titles Ahn’s first solo exhibition in the United States, which recently opened at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. The gallery says the show has drawn wide attention from audiences, press and art professionals, and positions Paradise, with 39 recent and representative works, as the major home-country counterpart arriving as his reputation abroad catches up.

Born in Miryang in 1953 and based in Yangpyeong, east of Seoul, Ahn has received two prominent Korean prizes, the Lee Jung-seop Art Award and the LEEINSUNG Art Prize. His last solo show at Arario’s Seoul space was Heart of the Artist, in 2019. The new rooms keep the human face at the centre: a line of small framed oils from his Sad Evaporation series, smeared and bruised in green and red, faces a pair of large Face portraits from this year, grey and pitted like weathered stone.

Paradise is on view at Arario Gallery Seoul from November 4 to December 26, 2026.

In a show that opens with a head blinded by a bomb, the request Ahn makes of his visitors is a simple one: keep both eyes open.

Tags: art exhibitions, Arario Gallery, Ahn Chang Hong, American University Museum, daguerreotypes, Korean contemporary art

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