interview with young hahn

If you meet Young Hahn in person you might be lucky enough to be treated to an impromptu lesson in painting. Even if you can only see his work from the screen of an iPhone (as this writer did while interviewing him), he will still take time to describe how foreground, middleground and background work, and how to depict light and shadow. He’ll explain how watercolors behave differently than acrylics, and he’ll point out all of this by showing you the exact places in a painting where you can see the concept he’s discussing. He does all of this with a genuine enthusiasm, as someone who has a lifetime of experience, but also constantly finds fresh inspiration. 

 “I like to describe what I see rather than draw what I see,” he says, pointing out a detail in one painting of sailboats at sunset. He says he hasn’t strictly painted a boat, but his brush strokes suggest the shape and mood. The colors he uses create rich and moody scenes, whether he is painting a vase full of flowers by a window or the Jersey City waterfront. 

Until recently, Young Hahn was reluctant to submit his artwork to galleries and art fairs. He has painted since high school, but wasn’t able to pursue it as a career when his family moved from Korea to the US in the 1976. Now that he’s retired from his forty-year career in IT, he’s thrown himself into classes and workshops again. For a long time, he assumed that his audience consisted of family and friends, not strangers he’d never met, but his children encouraged him to take his work further and it has paid off. In 2022, he entered his work into the Highland Park Juried Art Fair and was awarded second place. This past summer, he brought his work to Morris Arts’ Meet Me in Morristown, a summer outdoor series that highlights local artists and performers. He was not only surprised by the response to his work, but finds himself delighted to speak to new people about it. 

 “I love to share what I felt in a moment that inspired me to paint.”

 He paints daily, and his home studio is divided in two: one side is for watercolor, the other is for acrylics. He likes the challenge of watercolor, its fluidity and transparency, but he loves acrylics for the freedom they afford him. His watercolors are smaller and more contained, but when it comes to his abstract paintings he works spontaneously until his energy flags, then returns later to look at the composition and colors with a fresh perspective. 

 When asked about the artists he admires most, he names three. He loves Edward Hopper’s work for their simple subjects, the composition of his paintings, and for his color choices.  He admires Sargent’s watercolors because, “one stroke—one shape—makes everything different.” And for abstract work, he’s quick to name Mark Rothko for his color combinations, for how he moves the colors and fuses them at the edges of his painting. “It’s not just a bunch of squares,” he laughs.