Self-Portrait
‘My Self-Portrait is a kind of performance without an audience, only to be photographed since it is a portrait of my desire rather than the reality. There is a day I recall from my teenage years. I was sitting on the edge of the window in my apartment in New York, looking over the cityscape. I was thinking about how my youth was coming to an end, being unable to figure out my future. I looked down and saw the empty space, the void. There was a sudden change in my perspective on life and death, of present and future. The vision of the cityscape I was witnessing was not ‘real’ anymore. I felt the illusion of beautiful buildings was like the future or the unreachable ideals that still surround us somehow. The empty space was the present for me. I took a picture of my feet. That was the start of my project.’ – Jun Ahn
For Jun Ahn the world is where illusion and reality constantly meet and collide, and photography is just the right technique to capture it, bringing illusion to reality as it is. Her works describe our everyday life as situated on the border between these two different yet also interrelated concepts. That is why her body and view dangerously stand on the edge. She hones the knife of nervousness, of the moment.
