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YOUNG-IL AHN, SHIM MOON-SEUP, GABRIEL DE LA MORA: Where the sea ends
13th January, 2026 – 21st March, 2026
Perrotin
(via) Claridge’s
Brook Mews
London
Where the sea ends is a three-person exhibition featuring works by Young-Il Ahn, Gabriel de la Mora and Shim Moon-Seup. Spanning cross-generational practices and distinct cultural lineages, the exhibition turns to the sea and sky not as scenery, but as a set of visual problems: light, atmosphere, rhythm, surface, and the shifting threshold between perception and memory. In bringing these artists into a shared frame, Where the sea ends foregrounds contemporary art as a form of cultural collaboration, where different material languages arrive at a common insistence on the natural world as both subject and method.
“The sea is a place where visual and auditory spaces merge,shaped by light, scent, and sound. I was deeply moved by the wayin which light is reflected on the ocean—it left a spiritualimpression on me. It is through the colours reflected from lightthat the sea becomes truly beautiful. Light flickers, colour carries,expands, and leads us into the realm of imagination.”
— Shim Moon-Seup
Young-Il Ahn (b. 1934, Gaeseong, Korea) lived in Los Angeles from 1966 until his death in 2020, where California’s particular light and marine atmosphere became a lifelong tutor. A defining incident occurred in 1983, when a motorboat he was operating during a fishing expedition was swallowed by fog off the Santa Monica coast. Disoriented, he drifted into the Pacific. As he later recalled, “I lost all sense of direction. I cut the engine and let the currents take me.” When the fog finally lifted, the sea’s surface, broken into moving shards of sunlight, registered as revelation: “I became profoundly aware of the surface of the sea being reborn ineach and every moment.
What I witnessed was engraved deep in myheart. From that day on, the sea lived inside me and I became part ofthe sea.” Works from Ahn’s Water series carry that encounter forward. Built through subtly shifting densities of impasto oil paint applied with a palette knife, the paintings mimic the sea’s optical volatility, turning light into structure and repetition into meditation. Perrotin will feature Ahn’s work in a solo presentation at the FOG Design + Art Fair in San Francisco from 21-25 January. A survey of the artist’s practice will be mounted at Perrotin New York in September.
Gabriel DE LA MORAGabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico City) approaches the natural world through an exacting practice of collection and reorganisation. He gathers organic material, including feathers, then fragments and arranges them into patterns that read as both elemental and meticulously composed. The resulting works hold a tense clarity: tactile and intimate up close, yet often expansive at a distance, as if the image has been coaxed into being by accumulation rather than depiction. De la Mora describes his studio logic as a form of transformation rather than invention: “My work takes something that has already accomplished its functionso it is a remnant of something, yet becomes the beginning of something new through transformation. My definition of art, in a way, isa parallel to that of energy: art is not created or destroyed, it istransformed.” A current mid-career survey exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, curated by Tobias Ostrander, runs until 8 February, before travelling to MARCO in Monterrey, Mexico in April.
Shim Moon-Seup (b. 1943, Tongyeong, Korea) returns to the sea through the specific geography of childhood. His paintings from The Presentation series begin with the seascapes of Tongyeong, the coastal city where he grew up. After decades living between Paris and Seoul, he relocated back to Tongyeong in 2012, aged 69. The return is neither nostalgic nor incidental.
It is presented as a re-encounter with pace, weather, and repetition: conditions that shaped his sensibility early, and later became the ground of renewed artistic conviction. In these works, undulating brushstrokes layer and dissolve, registering the sea’s tempo and cycles with a reverence that is felt in the paint’s sustained attention. Shim will present a major retrospective at Ca’ Faccanon in Venice opening in May, offering a comprehensive overview of his artistic journey, bringing together key works across his career and tracing the depth and evolution of his practice.
Across the exhibition, the sea operates as more than motif. It becomes a shared grammar for abstraction: a way to speak about light without illustrating it, to suggest movement without narrating it, and to locate contemporary art’s capacity for reflection in the physical world itself. Where the sea ends proposes that what appears boundless can still be approached through discipline, material intelligence, and cultural dialogue.
Where the Sea Ends unites Young-Il Ahn, Gabriel de la Mora and Shim Moon-Seup in a contemporary art exhibition of sea-and-sky abstraction.
YOUNG-IL AHN, SHIM MOON-SEUP, GABRIEL DE LA MORA: Where the sea ends opens on the 13th of January, 2026 until the 21st of March, 2026 at Perrotin©2026 Perrotin
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