This painting belongs to Young-Il Ahn's Self-Reflection series. One of his most personal bodies of work, it shares many of the organizational hallmarks of his Water paintings, including compositional reliance on a grid, impasto marks, and similarly worked surfaces. But the autobiographical content of these paintings lends them a unique character within his oeuvre.
Woven into the abstract grids of the Self-Reflection paintings are a series of linguistic symbols, including references to the logically ordered, alphabetical writing called Hangul, as well as logographic symbols borrowed from Chinese called Hanja.