After the opening of Sync (2025) at Project Native Informant, we sat down with the Seoul-born artist to discuss his first London solo show, feline muses and materiality
From Salvador Dalí’s beloved ocelot, Babou, to René Magritte’s string of Pomeranians, all named Loulou, surreal artists have an entangled history with their furry friends. And 32-year-old Taewon Ahn is no exception, having devoted most of his surreal artworks to putting his cats, Hiro and Mako, on the map.
On 24 April, the Seoul-born artist celebrated the opening of his debut London solo show at Project Native Informant (PNI). Comprising 26 new paintings and sculptures that resemble the AR filters we play with on our phones, Sync (2025) surveys the capitalist consumption of images.
Melding fantasy and reality, Ahn has pixelated images of his favoured muse, Hiro, and contorted them into three-dimensional resin and urethane forms. The result: A visually tantalising and trippy experience that elicits feelings of dysphoria and adoration, leaving audiences oscillating between “ooh”s and “aww”s.
PNI’s Founder and Owner, Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja, first came across Ahn’s labour-intensive works at P21 Gallery during Frieze Seoul 2023. Interested in expanded institutional critique and the post-digital, he was instantly bewitched by his practice and inquisitive to learn about the artist’s mind and obsession with Hiro.
Not long after this initial encounter, PNI invited Ahn to represent the P21 Gallery as a guest for their international Condo London 2024 exhibition. The overwhelmingly positive feedback made it an easy decision for Tanbin Sastrawidjaja to welcome the South Korean artist back to showcase his new collection this spring.
Tanbin Sastrawidjaja told us: “As a gallery working with artists who inhabit the digital world, including iconic exemplars like the artist collective DIS, I found that Ahn’s approach contributed a novel chapter to the dialogue. He traverses the world with such passionate fervour, a sense of feeling we don’t see often. I also found the loop between the digital and analogue refreshing – how he begins by taking digital images, then applies a very analogue production process, and back again to the digital, by posting on social media.”
Just as fervent to uncover more about Ahn’s practice and feline obsession, we caught up with him after the opening of Sync for a chat.
Can you pinpoint when you first knew you wanted to become an artist?
I’ve loved drawing ever since I was a child, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I seriously considered pursuing art as a profession. I majored in Western painting at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, but my career as an artist properly began around 2021.
How would you define your artistic mission?
I have a few goals. Firstly, I want to make my cat Hiro more famous. Secondly, I want my work to reach and resonate with people from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Lately, I’ve also been questioning what beauty really means to me…
I often see scenes that feel deeply contradictory – a homeless person lying beneath a chic, well-designed typography sign or a group of shabbily dressed people lining up at a bus stop plastered with glossy advertisements of famous fashion models. These moments make me wonder: ‘Who are these aesthetically beautiful images really for?’
It can sometimes feels like all the time, taste and energy an artist or designer pours into creating a work can be rendered meaningless in the face of such stark realities. This realisation has changed how I view my own work. It’s also changed how I think about the kind of sensibilities I want to rely on as an artist.
I love my cat Hiro, but he doesn’t always appear cute or lovely in my work. He’s often distorted, strange, and even grotesque. I’m not interested in creating images that are universally appealing or conventionally pretty. I think that reflects how I see and experience the world. There’s a kind of beauty in subtle distortion or a drop of strangeness nestled within what seems beautiful. That’s the kind of feeling I’m trying to express.
Congratulations on your first solo UK show! How does it feel to be exhibiting your new works in London?
I’m truly grateful that PNI has allowed me to hold my debut solo show in a city where I felt the kind of visual disparity – I mentioned earlier – very vividly. Of course, Seoul is the same in many ways, but since it’s my everyday environment, I’ve grown numb to it.
Coming to a new space allowed me to see things I’d taken for granted in a new light. There’s a strong spirit of resistance in London, and a desire to break out of conventional moulds. I also felt inspired by the murals throughout the streets. While the direction of my work is different, I felt a strange sense of kinship with the graffiti I saw around the city.
Sync confronts the capitalist consumption of images. Could you tell us more about the concept?
As technology has advanced, the pace at which we consume images has accelerated, and that’s caused me a lot of visual fatigue. At first, I found these patterns entertaining. I incorporated digital memes as material in my work, trying to capture their light, darkly humorous qualities.
But over time, my perspective changed. I became more sceptical of this cycle and started focusing on things furthest from the digital world. That was when I noticed my cat Hiro lying next to me…
Sync serves as a shrine to Hiro, but you also have another male cat called Mako, who appears in your artworks from time to time. How exactly did the idea emerge to employ your pets as muses?
As I mentioned earlier, at one point, I was completely immersed in the digital world to the point that reality was starting to feel distant… During that time, Hiro appeared in my life, helping me escape the addictive, overstimulating visuals of memes and short-form videos on my phone.
Unlike digital images, Hiro interacts with me as a living being and activates all my senses. That’s why he naturally began appearing in my work. Mako came into my life three years after Hiro. I haven’t developed as deep a bond with him yet, so he appears less frequently in my pieces.
Thinking about the less furry members of your family, your father is a computer programmer by trade. Is there any correlation between his technological fluency and the digital literacy found in your practice?
In the late ’90s, when computers were becoming common in Korean households, I had early access to one thanks to my father. That allowed me to grow up with a strong ‘digital sensitivity’. That said, the digital media of my childhood wasn’t as immersive or omnipresent as it is for kids today.
Back then, digital content was clunky and crude – more of a novelty than something essential to everyday life. We played, ate and lived just fine without smartphones or computers. While I grew up alongside digital media, I still place great value on analogue experiences. I think the tension between analogue and digital might be what’s driving the distorted and glitched visual language in my current work.
Your new collection resembles the AR filters we play with on our phones. Although distinct from AI, the two sometimes crossover. Given the recent surge of cases related to copyright infringement and the unethical use of AI-generated content, what are your thoughts on the dark side of AI?
To be honest, I’m still not sure. I find AI both fascinating and a little unsettling. But at the moment, I still lack the experience to make a strong judgement. Just as I used memes as raw material in the past, I think I’ll need to actually create a few pieces using AI before I can discover the right angle to engage with it in my own way.
Moving on to the analogue element of your practice, why did you want to work with materials such as resin and urethane?
I want to break out of established frameworks and combine different materials in unexpected ways. It just so happened that many of my studiomates are sculptors, so I had the chance to experiment with a variety of sculptural materials. Creating works that hover between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, flattened sculptures or sculptural paintings, has been a fascinating process for me.
Sync runs in parallel with your deep sea fish (2025) show at Diesel Art Gallery in Tokyo. How did this collaboration come about?
The show at Diesel Art Gallery came about through an introduction from a gallery called CON, based in Tokyo. I didn’t think too much about it at the time – just that I was happy Hiro was getting introduced to a new audience.
Last year, W Magazine listed you as an artist to watch at Seoul Frieze Week 2024. What did it mean to you to be featured again at the fair?
To be honest, I didn’t have any grand feelings about it. I was just glad Hiro got some attention.
Do you have any upcoming commissions or projects you’re feeling more enthusiastic about?
When I return to Korea after the London show, I’ll be preparing for a two-person exhibition opening this September. It’s still early in the planning phase, but I already have a few ideas for things I’d like to try. I want to create more experimental works and try exhibiting in spaces that aren’t traditional white cube.
Sync will be open to the public until 25 May at the Project Native Informant in Bethnal Green, London.
