JUN AHN: Self-Portrait

About

Jun Ahn began her series of self-portraits while she was still a student. With what she calls ’a performance without an audience’, the artist wants to project herself into the future. In her eyes, the emptiness represents the now. She places herself in equilibrium atop skyscrapers, leaving a part of her body to jump into the void. Her photographs are neither manipulated nor retouched. A performance does occur but the artist takes care to hide the fasteners that support it. Being confronted with such images, we go through diametrically opposed feelings: there is fear, yes, but also fascination. The power of Jun Ahn’s work lies in this tension – fear tinged with desire. Is that not what we experience when it comes to projecting oneself into the future?’                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     – Nathalie Herschdorfer

Christophe Guye Galerie is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Jun Ahn (*1981, South Korea). The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of ‘Self-Portrait’, Jun Ahn’s most prominent series. The self-portrait has become de rigueur among female photographers since Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman made their now canonical works of the 1970s. Nikki Lee revived the genre in the late 90s with her studies of subcultures as self-portraits, and now the self-portrait has become almost a rite of passage among female photographers, who have been creating increasingly daring and specific versions of the genre. Jun Ahn’s suicidal self-portraits are a particularly unsettling, but captivating, addition to that tradition. They are paradoxical, conveying both the sense of the agency of a goddess or superwoman and the vulnerability and innocence of a wounded girl.