Dabin Ahn’s “Nocturne” and the Slow Meditative Work of Grief

Experts describe the psyche as an amalgamation of both conscious and unconscious material, fluidly combining to compose our sense of self and the reality around us. Artist Dabin Ahn’s compositions materialize this process: psychological and emotional innerscapes taking form through multimedia canvases that echo the layered, often opaque construction of subjectivity.

Ahn’s latest show, “Nocturne,” recently opened at Chicago’s DOCUMENT, marks a significant evolution in the artist’s practice. In just a few years, his work has undergone a gradual refinement of its symbolic language, with a growing sense of world-building that now extends beyond painting as a single medium. “I think less about physicality or materials and more about how to bring emotion into it,” Ahn tells Observer, sharing how he maintains a close physical engagement with each work, crafting every element with care. “My process is very intimate. I often hold the work while painting, almost like cradling it. There’s a sense of closeness from the beginning.”

Although he comes from a traditional painting background, he began to feel constrained by oil on canvas alone. He constructs his own frames and panels, shaping them beyond the canvas edge and adding other elements that extend each composition into physical space. “That process evolved: some frames remained traditional, others extended the edges, opening the image outward. Gradually, the work shifted visually,” Ahn recounts. More recently, the scale has become predominantly life-sized—not miniature, not monumental, but aligned with real objects and lived sensations.

During our conversation, Ahn identifies a key turning point—his father’s illness and passing—that profoundly affected his emotional state and, consequently, his work. As so often occurs, grief became a catalyst for artistic creation, and he began to shift both visually and materially, adopting more experimental approaches to articulate increasingly complex emotional states. “His illness progressively worsened, and of course, that affected my practice. I was emotionally charged whenever I made a work,” Ahn explains. “The work became more experimental because I was searching for ways to fully depict my emotional state.”

This manifests in the exhibition in the introduction of digital media, elegantly integrated within the canvas itself in The Four Seasons, to expand its narrative. “Video allows me to express emotional states more fully, especially after my father’s passing,” he says. “Painting remains central, but I needed something more.” Showing fragments of videos recorded by the artist over three years of travel and daily life, the work plays forward then loops backward in an infinite cycle, finding in the passage of time and events a value beyond any illusion of consequential finality. It is a powerful metaphorical reflection on what it means to hold time and move through it.

Although Ahn’s work remains predominantly figurative, it is strongly informed by a subconscious dimension that allows him to stage elegies on the meaning of life. The video component seems to allow a form of surrender to its non-consequential flow, as Ahn pushes beyond the self-contained image, opening the work into a more expansive narrative field. At the same time, fragmentation, remnants and interruptions are integral to the structure of his work. Ahn’s lexicon is now one of relics of daily life—ceramic vessels, stones, candles and personal effects that accompany the transient nature of everyday moments—appearing here broken or suspended. “They carry unknown histories, and that ambiguity fascinates me,” he notes, adding that he has a deep interest in how fragments survive, like artifacts in museums.

“I’ve become more interested in fragmentation and in questioning what constitutes a ‘whole.’ I relate this to life—how things wear out or break apart over time,” Ahn reflects. Coming from a still-life tradition, his earlier works focused on perfect, flawless objects. Now, that serene and unperturbed perfection appears as an illusion that cannot truly exist, even on canvas. “At the time, my life was simpler, and I hadn’t experienced much disruption, but as I encountered more complexity, fragments began to make sense visually and conceptually. They align with what I’m trying to express.”

Yet there is also an ongoing attempt to reassemble these fragments into a precarious unity. His works suggest a fragile balance, something momentary, always on the verge of dissolving. Both in their structure and in their symbolic vocabulary, they recall the tradition of vanitas, confronting the ephemerality and transience that characterize human existence. Motifs such as butterflies and feebly lit white candles make this idea of ephemerality explicit. Indeed, most elements in his work remain intentionally legible, without hidden symbolism. “They’re everyday objects that open onto broader existential meanings,” Ahn explains.

Importantly, Ahn is not illustrating emotions. Instead, he works at the threshold where emotion has already become symbol. His material fragments, embedded within these assemblages of free association, function as interfaces between bodily feeling and symbolic form—metaphorical portals through which to approach an inner language.

As the title also suggests, these works often inhabit transitional moments: twilight, nightfall or sunrise, suspended atmospheres that further reinforce an elegiac symbolism of impermanence. “I experience time through my studio routine—watching the sunset, then the moon rise as I work late into the night. Night offers a quieter, more introspective space,” Ahn shares. Each work becomes, for him, a condensed version of his studio environment—his memories, mindset and surroundings. “They’re dense objects that embody that experience.” Portals into the subconscious and, at the same time, physical embodiments of it, they crystallize a moment within an otherwise relentless emotional flow.

Ultimately, his works emerge from a continuous balancing of control and surrender. Images surface in his mind and are transferred onto the canvas, where emotional impressions find symbolic form, yet the structural and handcrafted elements require careful planning and execution to cohere within the whole. “Some aspects are planned, especially the structural elements, but much of the process is intuitive,” he explains. “I rarely end up with something identical to my initial idea, but I usually prefer what emerges through the process. I start by building the canvas in my woodshop, deciding the scale first. Then I move through layers—background, objects, or abstraction. I’m in control, but I’m also collaborating with the materials.”

Looking ahead, Ahn expresses a desire to further expand his artistic language by incorporating new materials while maintaining painting as its core. For him, this expansion represents a form of linguistic growth, aimed at fostering deeper connections with audiences. “It’s like becoming multilingual—each material expands my vocabulary,” he says. He acknowledges that he is still processing his father’s passing and that it will continue to shape the work, while also hoping that, over time, that pain might gradually give way to something else.

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