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. She studied Politics and Diplomacy at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and subsequently received a Ph.D. in Political Science at Yale University in New Haven, CT, U.S.A. After a Research Fellowship at the Brookings Institution, working at the Library of Congress, teaching at Indiana University as a visiting scholar and staying at home to bring up her children, in 2006, she moved to the greater Philadelphia area in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. With the change, she returned to her childhood dream of becoming a painter. For the first few years, she studied painting with Laurie Daddona, Karen Fogarty and Kashim Amoudi, and began showing her paintings at art shows in the greater Philadelphia area. 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 exhibitions in the Philadelphia area. She is now based in the greater Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Yeonmi Ahn works with watercolor, acrylic, oil and oil pastels. Most recently, she has been experimenting with various mixed media techniques such as incorporating painted paper collage and found objects. She has also been exploring a technique to combine Western painting methods with elements of oriental paintings and calligraphy in some of her floral watercolor and experimental paintings. While living in Pennsylvania, she also painted portraits of homes in the greater Philadelphia area for worthy local causes and on commissions.

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.