Sihn Ja An (B 1941) Korean/American, Watercolor Print. Signed in pencil lower right. Numbered in pencil 15/100 lower left. Biography of artist attached to back. 

Overall: 11 1/8 x 13 7/8 in.

Sight: 5 5/8 x 8 in.

#2909 . 

Sihn Ja An was born in January 1941 in Japanese-occupied Korea. Her tumultuous childhood during World War II and the division of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States left a strong impression on her. As a teen she became immersed in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture, studying Oriental Brush painting techniques. She studied European History, receiving both her Bachelors and Masters in the subject. While teaching history at Ewha Women’s University she met Tai Sung An, who was finishing his doctorate and working on several books detailing the rise of Communism throughout Eurasia. They married in 1965, and in 1969 she moved to Chestertown, Maryland to join him, as he had become a professor at Washington College. At the College she began to study Western styles of painting, eventually exploring her own ideas through charcoal, pastel, and watercolor, which became her preferred medium. By incorporating Korean cultural elements into her work she found her new calling, stating: “Art has… provided refuge and comfort. Moving to the United States altered the course of my life from history to art. Giving up my mother tongue, my writing, my teaching, I felt I had become crippled. I wanted to express my thoughts and feelings so much through my painting that painting developed into my strongest language.” After her husband passed away from lung failure in 1998, she began to travel back and forth between Korea and the United States to study and show her work, marrying again in 2003 to Horace Whiteley, who died in 2013. Today she teaches private lessons in brush art and exhibits in galleries along the New England coast, and her work is in many public collections in Chestertown and Seoul, Korea, as well as a permanent exhibition in the U.S. Department of State building in Washington, D.C.