"Place We Find Ourselves" | A solo exhibition by Jennifer Ahn

Date: Friday, December 12, 2025

Time: 7 pm - Doors open at 6:30 pm

Location: W83 Ministry Center

Step into the captivating world of Jennifer Ahn’s solo exhibition, Place We Find Ourselves, and experience her artistry firsthand. Join us at the W83 Ministry Center for an immersive in-person event, where each work invites reflection and discovery. Don’t miss the opportunity to connect with this artist’s compelling creations.

*Attendees will have the opportunity to purchase artworks on view at the opening

Abiding, 2024
Acrylic and ink on wooden panel

12" x 12"

exhibit statement

In Place We Find Ourselves, Korean-born artist Jennifer Ahn invites us into landscapes that mirror the heart’s journey—through loss and renewal, wandering and return. Her semi-abstract terrains, layered with paper, pigment, and fragments of Hanji (traditional Korean paper), are at once intimate and expansive: spaces where memory, struggle, and resilience converge.

Forests, rivers, and hills in Ahn’s work become vessels of endurance, their textured surfaces and flowing gestures echoing the rhythms of grief, hope, and quiet transformation. Torn paper and embedded fabrics trace paths between fragility and strength, shadow and light, suggesting that healing is a layered, luminous process.

Drawing from her Korean heritage and personal experience, Ahn transforms nature into companion and witness. Her paintings do not depict home as a fixed place but as a state of being—a sanctuary found in reflection, in the tactile richness of materials, and in the silent resilience of the world around us.

Continuing the inquiry of her 2022 exhibition Desolation | Consolation, Place We Find Ourselves is a meditation on impermanence, renewal, and the subtle, enduring beauty of becoming whole. Here, landscapes are not merely seen—they are felt, guiding us through turbulence toward a quiet, luminous return.

Dismantling idols, 2025
Acrylic, oil, Hanji collage on canvas

48" x 60"

Place We Find Ourselves reflects my journey as a Korean-American, semi-abstract visual artist who turns to landscapes and nature as both mirror and sanctuary. For me, painting is not simply about depicting a view—it is about charting a passage through struggle, transformation, and return. The terrain of hills, rivers, and trees becomes a metaphorical map of human experience, where moments of turbulence and loss coexist with hope and renewal.

Each work arises from layered processes—brushstrokes that suggest movement, textured surfaces built from paper and pigment, and colors that oscillate between shadow and radiance. These gestures hold the memory of hardship, yet they are equally rooted in the possibility of growth. My practice often points toward the idea of home, not merely as a physical destination but as a state of being: the recognition that we emerge, through difficulty, more whole and alive.

Texture plays a central role in my practice. I work with papers, fabric, and found objects, which I tear, strip, and embed into the surface with a gel medium. These tactile layers catch light, create shadows, and extend the painting into a dimensional space. The process of embedding Hanji(traditional Korean paper) is both physical and symbolic: it grounds my work in heritage while transforming fragility into strength.

Alongside ink, gouache, acrylic, and oil stick, these materials become vessels for movement—gestures of chaos and calm, turbulence and stillness.

Place We Find Ourselves invites viewers to see nature as a participant in this journey—a place of witness, healing, and quiet victory. In these landscapes, I hope others may glimpse their own stories of wandering, struggle, and the profound return home.

Linden Terrace, 2025
Acrylic, ink, Hanji collage on canvas
16" x 20"

Korean-born, self-taught artist, Jennifer Ahn, creates semi-abstract landscapes that weave memory, travel, and the redemptive power of nature into layered visual language. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, she developed an early reverence for forests, mountains, and open skies—motifs that continue to affect her work. Her practice blends abstraction and realism, drawing influence from Abstract Expressionism while integrating collage, paper, and textured surfaces to evoke both movement and stillness.

Her journey as a full-time artist began after confronting the mortality of loved ones, an experience that deepened her exploration of impermanence, longing, and resilience. Themes of humanity as sojourners—seeking belonging amid struggle and desolation—permeate her work.

Her past solo exhibition, Desolation | Consolation (Dec 2022, New York), reflected on the dualities of grief and hope. Her current solo exhibition, Place We Find Ourselves (Dec 2025), continues this inquiry into shared landscapes of memory and renewal.

At the Gallery at W83, we cultivate art and community on the Upper West Side, providing space for personal engagement, community conversations, and spiritual reflection, and collaborate with local artists from diverse backgrounds to explore universal themes of culture, community, and faith.

We bring together different perspectives in this space as an invitation to join in conversations we believe are vital to us all. We affirm the artist's right to express their views independently, and the views expressed by the artists are their own and do not necessarily represent the Gallery at W83 or Redeemer West Side.

exhibit curated by Adriana Caicedo

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