The exhibition Storm is Coming: Part Two is the direct sequel to Jisan Ahn’s solo show at Arario Gallery in Seoul last year. But actually, this story begins a year earlier, with the last time Jisan Ahn was on show at Galerie Bart. Back then, we showed his paintings in Everyday: After the Storm, a prophetic exhibition about the world after the corona crisis. Here, he wondered what kind of world awaited us after the storm. Meanwhile, he has his answer: an uncertain and chaotic one, in which all sorts of new doom looms, such as climate problems, the limits of the capitalist system, war and rising inequality. The sky is darkening and the wind is blowing: a new storm is soon to arrive.
As always, Jisan shows oil paintings with a poetic and mysterious character that surreptitiously emerges from the emotion he puts into the depicted figures and metaphorical objects. Alongside this subtlety and restraint, the raw power with which he sculpturally and texturally sets bare mountain rocks, dark clouds and storm winds on canvas is all the more telling. The influence the seventeenth-century landscape painters had on him, is all too visible in the skies. Jisan’s paintings grab the viewer and invite us to share in his existential angst.