Reality is compressed. Sensation is controlled and commodified within the logic of circulation. Feeling the world becomes increasingly impossible, and reality is reduced to real-time images. What has been lost today? What kind of life does one face, confronted by what may be the loss of the world itself? 

The world lays itself bare, even before meaning can be ascribed. It approaches us in a way that is utterly clear yet resistant to articulation. Reality(or the sense of it), once within arm’s reach, has hidden behind a lattice of audiovisual barriers—conveniently, simultaneously, daily. The retina and imagination are gradually becoming paralyzed from images that endlessly appropriate the lifeless remnants of past forms, and are consumed as if swept away in a flood of overwhelming information. Perhaps what is even more despairing is the fact that fissures can no longer be found in images. In this sleek world, “absurdity, futility, lack, and imperfections” are hidden. The subversive visual language that once depicted and revealed the contradictions and voids beneath the surfaces of the world through its representations has now degenerated into a mechanism that affirms and justifies the very excesses of reality. Images no longer critique the world, nor do they confess the contradictions of the system to which they belong, pointing to their problems. Instead, they become a part of it. Under these conditions, has contemporary art lost the capacity to create images that address “questions” and “doubt”? Have we reached a point where such an image itself is beyond imagination? 

All the more, perhaps this is precisely why some feel compelled to return to the task of facing and representing reality. And within that reconstructed representation, they may persist in attempting to draw the outside of this world: be it what does not exist, life that does not vanish, its lingering trace, a figure of madness, death, or the boundless world beyond. This may be closer to an act of despair than hope—closer to a blurred shadow or a specter, than to a concrete substance. 

 
At first glance, An Gyungsu’s paintings seem to faithfully reproduce things “as they are.” However, the notion of “real”istic “representation” often used to describe his work does not revert to the descriptive restoration of form. Rather, it encompasses a desire to negate the prevailing regime of images, the refusal of the voracious structures of capital, and a certain affective gesture directed toward an unbearable reality.

Certain scenes featured in An Gyungsu’s solo exhibition Layered—figures in a swimming pool, landscapes of the outskirts of the city, the floor of something, the facade of a building—at first glance come across as familiar moments from daily life. Yet it does not take long to realize that these scenes are not conventional “landscapes.” Rather than standardized depictions of landscapes or imitations of given, observable reality, they are the undersides of the everyday or perhaps even the residues of the afterlife. What appears familiar lingers within a strange stillness, colliding with the “reality” of the present from multiple directions. They elicit a strange sensation, distinct from the real-time “images” that constantly seize our attention, or the old landscapes familiar to the eye. 

Upon a closer look, one comes to realize that these are “arrested sites,” moments of “external time,” or shadows of “things pushed aside from memories.” While the paintings adopt photographic composition and perspective, their gaze is positioned on landscapes situated at the peripheries of a certain time and place, creating a subtle rift on the surface of replicated reality, evoking a ghostly affect. The familiar turns to estrangement and coldness, and the reality of the present can be sensed again through friction and collision. Moments of “arrest,” “exteriority,” and proximity to “death” that appear in his paintings exceed the bounds of simple depiction; they function as conditions for sensing the absence and the impossibility of the world. And perhaps, they harbor the anguish and despair that accompany the effort to recover this lost sensation, or to imagine something beyond a given situation.  

This attempt may be seen as another way of reiterating the despair of reality. Yet at the same time, it gestures towards a dissonance—a refusal to fully compromise with the emotions and conditions tethered to the present. The important thing is that An Gyungsu’s paintings knock on these very conditions of despair, constantly summoning the exterior and undersides of an impossible world. For one, the images in the exhibition make one face “reality”—as if to visualize the minimum amount of sensory perception required to pass through an unbearable world. Rather than mediated through compressed or augmented images, this reality is encountered through the body. By halting and delaying real-time that is constantly being renewed, he grasps toward the outside, death, and the spectral remains. In other words, An Gyungsu’s paintings restore the sensations of reality, while reconstructing the logic of representation. His paintings summon the shadows of past things, remnants of things that were never realized, sensations of a world never remembered—and emerge as images that pose a question to a “world that no longer (seems to) exist.”

Among the individual works featured in Layered, the first to catch the eye is Black Pool(2025), which occupies the large central wall of the exhibition space. The painting depicts a construction site in Hamdeok, Jeju. At a glance, the construction seems to be ongoing, but in reality, the abandoned project has been at a standstill for years. Regardless of its distinct geographical, historical, and cultural contexts, Jeju has in recent years been reshaped as a hub for tourism and development. The construction site depicted in the painting is also situated at the center of an area densely packed with hotels. Yet this arrested landscape, situated alongside rapid development, reveals a scene of ruin, clearly exposing the isolation and alienation that persist amidst indiscriminate expansion. It does not take much for the viewer to perceive the speculation, exclusion, and destruction that unfold under the logic of tourism and development. Some may be reminded of other local disputes and tragic histories, such as the Jeju April 3 Massacre or the protests against the naval base in Gangjeong Village. Others may be reminded that this scene of suspension and abandonment is by no means unique to Jeju—that halted and deserted construction sites have become a recurring sight across the world today. As seen with the excessive suppression in Gangjeong Village and the tragic fire at the Yongsan District 4 demolition site that occurred shortly thereafter, the physical and social disasters brought forth by ruthless enforcement are not confined to any single region. Rather, in the truest sense, they constitute the landscape of our present: the most “contemporary” scene. An’s works frame landscapes that are profoundly ordinary yet simultaneously double-edged and contradictory, contextualizing them through a reconstructed language of representation, offering a glimpse into the hidden cross-sections of the world. 

The contradictory yet quotidian cross-sections of the world, and painting as a surface of layers, can be distinctly observed in both the Beach(2025) and Swimming Pool series. Referring to photographs from the past—such as the Southeast Asian resorts after the 2004 earthquake, and the swimming pools near Dachau where the Holocaust took place—An Gyungsu brings scenes that linger like the shadows of particular events into his paintings. The Beach series(2021-) reflects the landscapes that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean/South Asian earthquake and tsunami, which claimed over 200,000 lives. This catastrophic disaster goes beyond a mere geological calamity, calling into question the relationship between nature and humans, the role of the state, crisis management, and the ethics of memory. While affected areas were swiftly restored into a holiday destination, the fact that the majority of the victims at the time were residents of impoverished communities near a big resort is largely overlooked. Just as easily forgotten is the reality that these so-called earthly paradises are, in fact, places where extreme class disparities are laid bare. It is also rarely acknowledged that the disaster holds countless deaths that remain unremembered due to the state’s inaction and neglect. Walls are raised again around the collapsed slums, and once more—inevitably—the place must return to being a resort. In a place where impoverished life must somehow persist, what prevails is not rest and care, but the entanglement of capital’s politics and the suppression of memory. The crumbling walls of the resort depicted in An Gyungsu’s Beach is not a mere backdrop—it stands as monument of that very contradiction.

The Swimming Pool series(2023-) can be understood in the same context. The work departs from several photographs taken in August 1944 in the Dachau region of Germany. The photograph shows a calm, leisurely atmosphere; people gazing over the sunlit surface of the water—a scene where no trace of tragedy appears to exist. During his research, the artist discovered that this photograph had been taken near the Dachau concentration camp. Established as the first concentration camp under the Nazi regime, Dachau served as a site for human experimentation, systematic massacre, and a prototype for totalitarian violence and control. An’s Swimming Pool(2025) thus presents landscapes that expose ruthless violence and systemic control of life and death, beneath the tranquil surface of the everyday. Here, paintings do not simply repeat a particular scene or reenact the past. Instead, the swimming pools the artist has painted summon effaced histories, deaths without graves, and traces of lives condemned to being forgotten, drawing them into the landscape of the daily. As done so in his Beach, in his Swimming Pool, An Gyungsu stages scenes visible to the eye, onto which he layers wounds that can never be sealed, along with silence and absence. Once again, these images faintly bring to the surface emotions and memories long deferred and suppressed under the name of the present, along with a world that does not exist. 

The series of paintings included in An Gyungsu’s solo-exhibition Layered trace the peripheries and undersides of today’s reality, the abyss of time and amnesia, and the gravitational field of socio-political violence—uncovering a spectral reality latent beneath the surface of a world we believe we “know.” Here, spectral reality refers not simply to what has disappeared or is absent, but to that which remains—unable to vanish—hovering the threshold between presence and absence, possessing form yet eluding substance. An Gyungsu’s paintings take this spectrality as a catalyst for reaffirming the world, and restoring our perceptual senses. In particular, as he reconstructs specific scenes, the artist evokes spectrality not through direct depiction, but by evoking something emotional and metaphoric. To this end, the canvas reveals concealed spatial strata, letting temporal density slowly settle into its surface. For instance, the “pit” in Black Pool marks a specific site situated in the aftermath of an event, while also serving as a metaphor for a present that had collapsed on itself, unable to become anything at all. Likewise, the “leisurely landscape” in the Swimming Pool series masks a historical tragedy beneath a facade of tranquility, inflected with a subtle sense of estrangement. While presenting clearly defined scenes, these images simultaneously evoke what has been erased. They gesture toward a calm made possible only by what is erased and concealed, and toward a history densely compressed, both suspended between absence and presence. It is not that these paintings lack form; rather, it is through their clearly defined form that they convey what precedes and follows the given image—their underside and depth. In this sense, these paintings are once again spectral. They are things that appear before us but remain unseeable—things that exist yet whose existence cannot be affirmed with certainty. They are not traces of those who have already vanished, but of those who have never fully disappeared. 

Thus, the temporality of painting is deferred, suspended, left abandoned, stripped of its function. This abandoned painting is not simply a ruin, but can be recognized as a remnant of an unrealized future, a lingering terrain of possibility erased by the system. In this manner, An Gyungsu layers and submerges a distinct sense of time and space, directing our gaze towards places excluded from and cast out by the protocols of the contemporary city, structured to plan, execute, and dispose. Scenes in which pain is casually placed and concealed not only question political decisions and historical contexts, but also visualize the paralysis of ethical perception. Rather than denouncing these realities aloud, the artist condenses them into a murmur, almost like an auditory hallucination, suggesting a quiet mode of looking. Through a process of painting through layering, he transforms this into the temporality of the painting. In these images depicting neglected realities, the slight tremors, subtle distortions, and compositional misalignments create delicate fissures through which the presence of the unseen may be sensed. Here, the “membrane” of the painting becomes a place where unreachable memories and unspoken truths lie dormant. And it is within this very “membrane”—where perception warps and the gaze slips—that the specter drifts. 

Since around 2010, An Gyungsu has explored surrounding places, focusing on erased subjects, and on places and times that can never be fully effaced. While collecting various materials, including photographs and researching historical events, he has consistently sought to avoid reducing them to mere pictorial representation and instead has turned towards unfolding them through painterly reflection. Within today’s visual field, saturated with visual information yet with meaning increasingly obscured (and no one attempting to discern that meaning), An’s paintings can be said to have originated from dwelling upon or wandering between excess and absence—layering image-meanings upon one another. And these images do not exist merely as visual evidence; rather, they have become layers or membranes that subtly reveal the residues of unspoken emotions and unforgotten experiences. Ultimately, in encountering An’s paintings, the viewer senses less of what is (or was) present within the layered strata than what is absent, or has disappeared. Just as the title of the exhibition, Layered, suggests, the exhibition functions as a site where multiple perceptions of time and space overlap. 

The “layers” in these paintings are not simply material surfaces. They are traces of what remains after disappearance, erased yet never fully gone. They are textures that have endured cycles of being painted over, erased, and painted again: the spectral “layer.” An Gyungsu quietly reveals that today’s reality is shaped by erased existences and absences, building his paintings by accumulating layers where what’s been lost and what remains, memory and amnesia, endlessly collide.