Two Uses of the Past

Installation view, "Two Uses of the Past: Changboh Chee and Seongmin Ahn," AHL Foundation, New York, July 26 to August 23, 2025. Above, Ahn's mural banner "Human Kind One Planet," 2025, 6 x 14 feet.

By RICHARD VINE August 11, 2025

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner

Changboh Chee and Seongmin Ahn, the artists selected for this year’s AHL Mural on Display & Gallery Exhibition, represent two contrasting responses to the long Korean artistic heritage and the 20^th-century incursion of Western influence. Chee, who died in 2023 at the age of 99, practiced pure traditionalism, replicating a venerable Asian ink-painting mode because he believed that the most fundamental human truths and most effective artistic principles were establish centuries ago and remain perfectly valid today. Ahn, a midcareer artist trained in both Korea and the US, takes a more eclectic approach, combining Eastern and Western mediums and visual strategies, and adapting traditional forms to contemporary concerns. Their dual show “Two Uses of the Past,” taking a cue from the 1918 essay “On Creating a Usable Past” by the literary critic Van Wyck Brookes, is structured as a visual dialogue between the two artists and their respective sensibilities. 

Brookes, impelled by American turn-of-the-century dynamism, argued that a culture should never settle on a standardized, unchanging story of its own origins but should instead continually—and diversely—reinterpret its history. 

Ahn embraces that notion with panache. While she often uses the traditional mediums of brushed ink and color on mulberry paper, she also unhesitatingly employs contemporary materials such as plywood, vinyl, laser-cut laminates, and computer-controlled ultraviolet light. Even when she proffers time-honored motifs—mountains, waterfalls, flowers—she does so with a comic twist: exaggerating the length of plant stems, placing rocky peaks inside ceramic bowls, depicting rivers that cascade from cabinet drawers, using peonies as oversized headdresses for tiny dogs.
 

Changboh Chee, "White Crane Standing," 1968, ink on paper, 15 3/4 x 12 inches.

Moreover, Ahn introduces everyday items that expand the ink-painting repertoire: elongated noodles dangling from chopsticks, floral bouquets larded with cookies and ice-cream cones, teapots spouting cloudy landscapes, bookcases whose reverse perspective denotes hyperspace, handguns morphing into vegetation, cell phones recording classic mountain ranges, and electrical sockets engulfed by Baroque-style decorative flourishes.

Ahn even transmutes fluid calligraphy—along with poetry and painting, one of the “three perfections” sought by ancient Korean literati—into stiff signage. Her festooned letters convey cryptic but hopeful messages (“Again,” “Rise Up”), offset by “ornamental curses” (“Fucking Idiot,” “You Are Delusional”) that have occasionally been addressed to the artist herself. Such memories add ironic poignancy to recent works in which candy-sweet flowers surround a smoky mirror inscribed with the words “You Are Beautiful.”

Ahn’s work—in which minhwa (the brightly colored Korean folk art depicting animals, flowers, and furnishings) meets Western surrealism, thus transmogrifying historic motifs with new materials and new themes—bespeak the cultural and psychological adaptability demanded by today’s globalized, shape-shifting life. 

Seongmin Ahn, "Its Inside Is Bigger Than Its Outside peonies 06," 2016/24, ink and color on mulberry paper, installation size varies, centerpiece 36 x 48 inches.

Chee, on the contrary, believed that the past is perfectly usable as is. By duplicating venerable motifs, by carrying them forward without alteration, he cast a revealing light on the importance of context and thus, paradoxically, on change itself.

Born in 1923, during the Japanese occupation, Chee was raised by his illiterate mother and coalminer father in a small village near Pyongyang. He won entrance to a Japanese university but was thereafter forcibly conscripted into the Japanese army. After WWII, buffeted by Korea’s political chaos and civil war, Chee was separated from his family in the North and made his way to the United States. In just six years, he earned a PhD from Duke University and began a career teaching sociology. No reclusive academic, Chee advocated unrelentingly—in Washington and Seoul, at the U.N., and elsewhere—for South Korean democracy and reunification with the North. Meanwhile, painting privately and actively patronizing of the arts, Chee befriended some of the most notable Korea practitioners of his time, including Kim Whan-ki, Kim Tschang-yeul, and Po Kim.

In his own art, a further confirmation of Korean identity, Chee used the most traditional means—brush and black ink with occasional touches of color—to render the most traditional motifs. His images bespeak a respect for the legacy of Korean scholar-artists and a deep conviction that human well-being is rooted in the cycles of nature.

Changboh Chee, "Bird," 1968, ink on paper, 14 x 7 1/2 inches

Yet this dreamy lexicon (more poetic than that of programmatic court painters or other professional artists)—evokes a realm of symbols. Cranes (white, long-limbed, and graceful) bespeak longevity, purity, peace, harmony, and perpetual youth. Water lilies embody purity and enlightenment arising out of the muck of daily existence. Vessels, as emblems of artistic form itself, ferry substances between the quotidian and the spiritual. Sailboats recall livelihood, journeys, and adventures. Trees and bamboo represent integrity, uprightness, strength, resilience, endurance, virtue, nobility of character. Butterflies hint teasingly of romantic love. Deer suggest longevity, harmony, happiness, good fortune, enduring marital love, and filial piety. Flowers offer beauty, love, and renewal. Snow heralds new beginnings, a fresh start. 

It is almost as if the viewer were adrift among Plato’s Ideas. All of these images, but especially those of cranes, Chee executed with admirable economy, evoking the entire form with a few efficient, living lines. Only his painting of a bull, viewed head-on, is denser, darker, more substantial. The beast—which incarnates strength, persistence, and a surprising gentleness of gaze—conveys a rare acknowledgement of effort and endurance. Some viewers have even read it as an emblem of the human capacity to bear injustice and adversity without losing heart. 

Why, then, did a trained sociologist engage in the gentlemanly pursuit of muninhwa (literati painting), thereby excluding from his work any direct scrutiny of common social activity—to say nothing of war, politics, commerce, and power intrigues? And why does his nature painting contain no trace of what Tennyson called “nature red in tooth and claw”? (Some 66 percent of all animal species live by killing and eating other animals; the remainder devour plants and flowers.) Why would a man who had been through war, persecution, exile, and political struggle choose to create an art so completely devoid of sturm und drang?

Left, Seongmin Ahn, "Again," 2020, 46 x 24 inches. Right, Changboh Chee, "Bull," 1967, ink on paper, 24 x 22 1/2 inches.

The answer, implicit in the question itself, is confirmed by the artist’s memoir Solitude and Freedom. Finding peace and compassion in his own soul, qualities only deepened, not negated, by a lifetime of struggle, Chee opted to promulgate the dream of peace. His was an act not of naivete but of moral determination—the choice to celebrate the best even while fully knowing the worst. Such wisdom is often communicated through myths—fictions necessary for both social cohesion and personal sanity. Thus in the West we have myriad depictions of the lost Garden of Eden, along with future-oriented artworks like Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom paintings (1820-49), sweetly illustrating the prophecy in Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” 

And then there is the paradox of emulation. A crane depicted in a Josean dynasty manner for a Josean dynasty audience is identical to, yet not at all the same as, a crane depicted in a Josean dynasty manner for a 21^st-century viewership. Cranes have not changed in the last 600 years, nor has the brushwork technique with which Chee rendered them. But we have changed—not human nature but human society and hence our mode of perception. We do not, we cannot, apprehend these images as our ancestors did. Whether that difference—between a temperament formed by an agrarian, socially hierarchical, formally religious, imperial state as opposed to an urban, post-industrial, putatively democratic, and functionally secular commonwealth—is a good thing or a bad is perhaps the most important question underlying this exhibition. The solution must lie in the way-of-being that each sensibility produces. 

Hence the inherent value of the artistic matchup in “Two Uses of the Past.” Straight muninhwa vs. modernized minhwa; essentialism vs. relationality; preservation vs. adaptation; reverence vs. cheek. Neither one nor the other definitively prevails; the truth—like the aesthetic reward and the fun—lies in the timeless exchange. WM