About the artist

Born and raised in South Korea, Yeonmi Ahn studied for many years with Hyunkye Cho, a South Korean watercolor master, continuing her training in drawing and painting until her last year of high school. After receiving a BA in Politics and Diplomacy at Yonsei University, South Korea and a Ph. D. in political science at Yale University, New Haven, CT, doing a fellowship at the Brookings Institution, working at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, briefly teaching at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN as a visiting scholar and staying at home to bring up children, she started painting full time in 2006.

For the first few years thereafter, she studied with Laurie Daddona, Karen Fogarty and Kashim Amoudi to broaden her artistic horizons. Until 2013, she had been a member of Philadelphia/Tri State Artist Equity, ARTsisters, the Delaware Valley Art League and PAC (Philadelphia Arts Connection) and an associate member of the Philadelphia Watercolor Society. She participated in many art shows in the Philadelphia area.

Yeonmi Ahn works with watercolor, acrylic and mixed media. Most recently, she has been experimenting with various mixed media techniques such as painted paper collage and incorporating found objects in paintings. She has also been trying to combine Western painting methods with techniques of oriental paintings in some of her watercolor and experimental paintings. In addition, she has painted portraits of homes on commission or for worthy local causes.

She paints things and events around her—ordinary things that evoke a strong emotional response in her. She feels that her English, as a second language, is neither eloquent nor fluent enough to fully express what her mind sees; and her native Korean, now rusty from several decades of living outside Korea, has long ceased to be her primary means of communication. Like Edward Hopper, she paints what she can’t put into words. She has recorded flowers for the fleeting beauty that she saw when they were presented to her, for her emotional responses to them, and in memory of the giver’s love, generosity and care. She paints the memories and responses to certain events for which she finds her words are inadequate.

At present, she is working on a series of mixed media, acrylic, watercolor paintings, tentatively titled Four Seasons, using various approaches to memories of her childhood hometown in South Korea and many other places where she has lived and traveled to.