Ahn Jun

Jun Ahn (안준) is a South Korean photographer, known primarily for her Self-Portrait series of photographs taken from atop high buildings. She has worked extensively in the United States, particularly in New York City, now living with her family in Seoul, South Korea.

She has produced the books Self-Portrait (2018) and One Life (2018) and Until You Left Off Dreaming About(2013).

Career Ahn was educated at the University of Southern California, graduating with a degree in art history in 2006, followed by two years of postgraduate study of photography at the Pratt Institute. While at the Pratt she began work on the Self-Portrait project.

In 2009 and in 2010 she was awarded the Dean's Scholarship at Parsons The New School for Design, and in 2011 received both the Dean's and a departmental scholarship. Ahn received her phD degree in photography. Her dissertation investigates the aesthetic of high-speed photography and in a relation to performance and high-speed photography on her work.

Self-Portrait South Korean artist Jun Ahn describes her series Self-Portrait (2008–2013) as “a kind of performance without an audience.”

Self-Portrait depicts Ahn on or near the top of skyscrapers, often leaning from a window or seated on a ledge. Ahn was inspired by a joke about jumping off a building due to the stock market losses from the 2008 financial crisis. She began to think of tall buildings in urban areas as places of contrasts. Ahn sees cities as areas of simultaneous comfort and anxiety, with her photos showing her on the edge of both a physical and psychological space.

Aiming her lens straight down, she records her feet and the sheer drop to the streets below, so that the city reads as a vertiginous bird’s-eye field. The work is strongly experiential, pushing the viewer to feel the same mix of thrill, fear and anxiety that such a position provokes. The project began with a photograph of her feet she took while sitting on the edge of an apartment building while a student at Pratt, and has continued since. While Ahn used various safety measures for Self-Portrait, she never altered her photographs in a graphics editor like Photoshop.

One Life Ahn began One Life in 2013, after completing Self-Portrait. She was influenced by her time as a teacher at the Korea University Museum. Noting the high levels of anxiety among her students, she started One Life to show and examine the uncertainty and randomness of life. The photography for One Life happened over five years and involved objects captured while in the air, most commonly apples. Ahn said the photographs represent how life is “a process of free fall,” like an object affected by gravity.

Drawing on her background in art history, she turned to examining how such systems visually interpret natural language. While working with Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator (now Copilot), Ahn found that the platform algorithmically filtered out words such as “yourself” and “god” from its image-generation parameters; in response she devised prompt structures to work around those restrictions. The resulting series — Good Morning, John, together with the related A Room for You and God — visualizes, through such prompts, a self-anthropomorphized system greeting its maker in the morning. Ahn then re-photographed the AI-generated images as they appeared on floating monitors.

In the series, the artificial intelligence appears as portraits in the form of human faces. Ahn draws an analogy to the idea of a god shaping humans from clay in his own image: the intelligence that humans have built likewise mirrors the human form. She asks what such an intelligence might think on seeing its own portrait from behind, using the works to probe how humans and machines perceive one another and how an artificial intelligence might define itself.

The title echoes Nam June Paik’s 1984 satellite broadcast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, an optimistic answer to the surveillance dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; the name “John” refers to John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence.” For Ahn the title at once announces the arrival of mainstream AI and holds together the Orwellian wariness and the Paik-like optimism that shape her approach to new media.

Until You Left Off Dreaming About Ahn’s project, Until You Left Off Dreaming About, marked a full turn to AI image-making. Created around 2023 while she was recovering from major surgery — bedridden and confronting her own mortality — it is composed entirely of AI-generated images. Rather than photographing the world, Ahn used text-to-image generators, which she likened to a form of dream-like imagination, to give shape to scenes she had only pictured in her mind. The images draw on memories of other people’s stories and of moments shared with her while she was living and studying in the United States in the early 2000s, before the spread of smartphones. Published by Case Publishing in 2024, the book gathers 307 images across 288 pages, with texts in English, Japanese, French and Korean.

Ahn has framed the series as an attempt to picture a life she did not lead. Wondering whether, had she set off travelling in her early twenties instead of sitting exams and working part-time jobs, she might have made such photographs, she describes the resulting landscapes as “a nostalgia for something that I have never had.” For Bate such generative images are “not simply fake or real, but statistical samples” — aggregates of cultural data with no single origin in time or place — so that works like Ahn’s stage a new relation to the photographic archive, in which culturally formed memories are recombined into speculative forms of subjective memory. One Life. Tokyo: Case, 2018. Until You Left Off Dreaming About Tokyo: Case, 2023. 2013: Ahn Jun Solo Exhibition, Kips Gallery, New York AHAF 13’ Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Hong Kong 2014: Self-Portrait, Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland 2015: On the Edge of Time, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Hong Kong 2016: The Present, 63 Art Museum, Seoul, Korea 2017: InvisibleScapes, Xijiantang Art Museum, Jindezhen, China 2018: On The Verge, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA, USA

Group exhibitions 2011: Parsons Festival, New York, United States 2013: The Youth Code, Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland 2014: Double Mirror: Korean-American Artists, American University Museum, Washington, United States 2015: As Far as the Mind Can See, exd'15, Porto, Portugal 2016: Ich, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany 2018: Space; Crashes in Street Life, Triennial of Photography Hamburg

Awards 2013: "Ones To Watch," British Journal of Photography, London 2021: "2021 Parcours Femme, Elle x Paris Photo, Paris