About
Hyun Jin Ahn (b. 1998, Seoul) is a ceramic artist based in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. She received her B.F.A. in Ceramic Crafts from the College of Fine Arts, Kookmin University, and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in Ceramic Arts at Ewha Womans University. She holds a Level 2 Arts Education Specialist certification and has previously founded and directed both Sto Studio, a ceramic workshop, and Heut, a ceramic jewelry brand.
Ahn's work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including Eumbanjung: Protest by Young Artists (University Alliance PACO, Seoul, 2020), WTMH: Welcome to My Home (Experimental Space PADO, Seoul, 2021), and Seoul Crafts at the 2024 Craft Trend Fair (COEX, Gangnam, Seoul), alongside the Cube Member Exhibition at the Seoul Craft Creation Support Center (Seoul, 2024). Her work was recognized as a Finalist at the 2024 Seoul Specialized Product Development Contest, and in the same year she served as a professional member of the Seoul Craft Creation Support Center.
Artist Statement
From the concept of 'in-between'(Hannah Arendt 1958), my work begins—from the gaps between objects, between places, between background and foreground.
I have lived in New York, Lautoka Fiji, Busan, Ilsan, Chungju, Gyeonggi, and Seoul. Each move carried its own displacement, its own relearning of how to inhabit a space. Yet across every place I passed through, two things remained: the tiles on the floor and the frames on the wall. Culture shifted, language changed, people came and went—but tiles and frames persisted, indifferent to context, faithful to function. They were the only consistency I had.
My practice draws these overlooked objects into focus. When the background is made foreground, things that once performed their function in silence begin to speak. Within them, I locate myself—an identity assembled through transit, never fully at rest.
I work with symbolic marks—'X', '/', '+'—cut, pressed, and built into ceramic surfaces. These gestures enact both connection and severance. The resulting textures recall scar tissue: not the moment of injury, but its aftermath; not the wound, but the skin that closed over it. To work from the in-between is to accept incompleteness as a condition rather than a failure.
I may leave again. And when I do, another floor will offer its tiles, another wall its frames—waiting, as they always have.
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958.