Through his painting, Jisan Ahn questions the relationship between reality, image, and creator and uses the image of his studio to do so. He often borrows recognizable images, and this painting recalls ‘The Sea of Ice (1824)’ by a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich(1774~1840) as shown below.
The shirts hanging on the wall are juxtaposed with shipwreck sinking, and the shape of pink styrofoam on the studio floor mimics the pinnacle of the broken iceberg. While Friedrich’s painting refers to the eternity of nature against the fragile and mortal life of human beings, Ahn expresses the sense of loss or dissolution by the use of a daily scene of his studio.