As I was looking at Chul Hyun Ahn’s exhibit, Perceiving Infinity, on view at the Academy Art Museum through January 26, I overheard a woman saying, “My five-year-old grandson had to keep coming back to see the new room.” I glanced over to see her standing at what appeared to be the entrance to a wide hallway extending outward beyond the gallery wall into what I knew perfectly well to be the Museum’s front lawn.
The new “room,” an artwork entitled “Void,” is a rectangle just 12.5 inches deep containing a frame of glowing blue light that appears to repeat back again and again into a shadowy interior. Tall enough to walk into (were it not blocked by the clear side of a one-way mirror), it resembles a hallway out of Star Trek or perhaps an accordion ramp leading onto a jumbo jet. Its inexplicable depth and high-tech glow are fascinating and a bit unnerving. Clearly, it’s the entryway to some kind of uncharted territory.
A Korean-born artist now living in Baltimore, Ahn uses mirrors and light to create illusions of deep infinity in works that are by turns meditative, perplexing or eerie. By positioning LEDs, fluorescent lights, or black lights between two mirrors in housings made of plywood, cast concrete or cast acrylic, he sets up reflections that repeat endlessly into the distance.
Few things are as fascinating, enticing, terrifying and unimaginable as infinity. Space travel and science fiction leap to mind, as does the infinite space inside our own minds. The son of a Buddhist, Ahn grew up with Asian ideas about the limitlessness of existence. In his early paintings, he explored the idea of infinity through hard-edge geometric abstraction, but by the time he was working on his MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, he had begun positioning mirrors facing one another to create the illusion of infinity. It’s an old trick, gimmicky but handy in interior decorating for making rooms appear bigger. (You can even buy a ready-made infinity light mirror on the internet.) But it’s what Ahn does with it that makes it so intriguing.
Included in this year’s prestigious Venice Biennale, Ahn is one of several up-and-coming artists following in the footsteps of artists such as James Turrell, Dan Flavin, and Doug Wheeler, who began exploring the effects of light phenomenon on perception in the 1960s. His work doesn’t have the engaging ethereality of Turrell’s “St. Elmo’s Light,” installed at the Museum last spring, but like Turrell, he is less concerned about light itself than about the visceral experience of the space that light makes visible.
It’s a shame that the 13 works in the show have to share a single gallery space. Ahn is exploring several very different ways of looking at infinity, but whenever you try to focus on one piece, the reflections of pieces on the other side of the room distract you. In order to take in the full effect of any of these works, you have to imagine what it would be like to see it in isolation.
Some of the works are just plain fun to look at whether or not you consider their implications. “Dots,” with its grid of 20 disks, each a different color, repeating back into the distance, is a light-hearted meditation on deep space, while the multiple curves resembling a thumbprint in “Mirror Drawing #21” turn a flat image into a fascinating, cavernous dance of shadowy channels disappearing into profound darkness.
Other works play with your head by presenting contradictory illusions of space. In “Forked Series #28,” a dusky pink fluorescent light slants across two slightly angled mirrors in a small square box so that the reflections above it climb backwards in an upward curve. It’s fun to play with—shift your gaze from side to side and you can see farther into the reaches of the ascending space. But below the fluorescent tube, a different set of reflections twist incongruously downward illuminating another phantom space at an impossibly mismatched angle. It’s as if you’re seeing two realities simultaneously.
Like a classic Zen koan, there’s no way to resolve the dilemma, but you’re bound to begin wondering about the nature of space. You know the deep space you’re seeing isn’t actually there, yet how is it any different from the boundless space we experience in thought, dreams and meditation?
The most striking of Chul’s works are the pieces that posit real space as the beginning of infinity. The life-sized “Railroad Nostalgia,” with its physical tracks and ties set in gravel receding via reflections into purple-black darkness, calls to mind so many things, from childhood walks on railroad tracks to the trackside tension of film noir, that you’ll be thinking about it for days. Even more potent is “Tunnel,” a terrifying jaunt into vertigo. Approaching this square cinderblock enclosure installed in the center of the gallery, you see fluorescent tubes lighting a ladder that leads down and down into a deeper underworld than you’d want to imagine. Quietly utilitarian from a distance, close up, it suggests a claustrophobic underworld of sewers, bomb shelters and escape tunnels.
With their glowing lights and shiny acrylic surfaces, many of these pieces feel cold and technological, not unlike the computer screens we stare at daily. Apparently this lack of warmth and humanity is a concern that interests Ahn, as he has recently begun a series of drawings done directly on the surface of his mirrors.
In “Mirror Drawing #23,” it’s almost a relief to see evidence of the artist’s hand in the spidery white lines radiating outward from a vertical ellipse in the center. Bright white against the deep black space, every nuance of each line is repeated again and again. This is one of his simpler “Mirror Drawings.” Others, more complex and not included in this exhibit, explore the stunning intricacies of repeated form in a way that the simpler, more geometric works cannot. The laws of physics take over with the repercussion that every mark Ahn makes is replicated infinitely. As if echoing another law, that of karma, the small actions of his hand have an enormous and apparently infinite effect. Like the glowing blue tunnel in “Void,” Ahn’s drawings suggest limitless space that is as full and alive as it is empty.
Both science and Buddhism are dedicated to questioning all phenomena. Ahn draws on both traditions as he weaves these various threads of inquiry together, searching out ways to hone in on an understanding of the human relationship to infinity. His works are by turns fun, techie, psychological and spiritual, begging the question, do all these paths ultimately lead the same way?
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