hae was born on February 11, 1941, in Kyoto, Japan, to Korean parents during the Japanese colonial rule over Korea. After the Second World War, he returned to his home country with his family.  At the age of twelve, inclined to the arts and nature, Ahae was deeply moved by an ancient Korean poem that depicted the natural beauty of Korea. In this poem he encountered the word “ahae” — the ancient Korean word for child — for the first time and strongly identified with the term, later making it his own artistic pseudonym. At the age of twenty a major turning point came when Ahae found Christian faith through the Bible. For the remainder of Ahae’s life, his artistic, environmental and entrepreneurial endeavors would constantly work in tandem with his faith.

By the dawn of the 1990s, Ahae’s commitment to managing his emergent businesses in a manner consistent with his faith had drawn negative attention from the South Korean business and political elite. In 1991, Ahae was the focus of a baseless but intense and sensationalist media campaign that sought to link Ahae to a widely publicized 1987 mass suicide of members of a religious sect known as Odaeyang. In reality, Ahae was not a member of Odaeyang and had no connection to that tragic event. After prosecutors sought to question Ahae about the Odaeyang incident, he faced unrelated charges of allegedly soliciting funds from members of his own church under false pretenses. These discredited charges were resurrected from investigations that had already been closed in 1989 and repackaged in the heated atmosphere of 1991, when the government needed a visible target to distract the public from a burgeoning presidential scandal. Ahae adamantly denied these charges throughout his life. But because Ahae was charged amidst the uproar following the Odaeyang tragedy, and media reporting at the time did not emphasize that the charges against Ahae were unrelated to Odaeyang, many in the public assumed that Ahae’s conviction was somehow connected to the tragedy. In 2014, South Korean prosecutors issued a public statement that confirmed the Odaeyang mass suicide was the subject of at least two rigorous investigations and stated unequivocally that Ahae had no connection to the mass suicide.

Ahae was incarcerated for four years. In his cell, there was a window through which he watched a tree with a bird’s nest wisely built between the tree’s thickest branches, and that sustained daily act of attention stayed with him. He often spoke about this scene after his release. Years later, in 2009, as Ahae set out to sketch the natural scene outside his studio window in the countryside of South Korea, he noticed the stirrings of the various flora and fauna and began photographing them. Ahae’s focus on the natural beauty of his surroundings evolved into what is now known as the Through My Window project, in which Ahae took a total of 3.3 million photographs of the natural world just beyond his window continuously, day and night, for five years. Throughout all hours of the days and nights of the four seasons, Ahae captured the birds, water deer, land and sky, nightscapes, and water reflections he observed through his studio window. The project revealed itself to be Ahae’s opportunity to regain the four years he had lost to his unjust incarceration by sharing with the world the seemingly obvious and yet usually unnoticed natural universe. This insight into nature could only be gained through Ahae’s unbroken observation, through his camera lens, of the natural world over the course of years, battling with the ceaseless elements of his internal and external conditions, to ultimately reveal the infinity of the natural world. This discovery could not be suppressed by physical confinement (the involuntary confinement of his imprisonment), but rather was made possible by it (the voluntary confinement to one window in his studio).

Ahae’s work from the Through My Window project ultimately was shown at ten exhibitions in six countries, including at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal in New York City; the Great Hall in the National Gallery in Prague; Clarence House Gardens and the Royal Botanic Gardens in London; the Vremena Goda Center in Moscow; the Alinari National Museum of Photography in Florence; the Magazzini del Sale in Venice; the Louvre Museum in Paris; and the Palace of Versailles. At each location, Ahae’s works were acclaimed.

On April 16, 2014, at the end of Ahae’s fifth year of work on the Through My Window project, the sinking of the Sewol ferry resulted in the tragic deaths of 304 passengers, the majority of whom were children. Once again Ahae was baselessly engulfed in controversy. The public demanded accountability for the government’s failure to rescue any passengers during the ferry’s slow sinking, and Ahae was again used as a convenient scapegoat to deflect public attention from the government.

The government seized on the fact that the Sewol was owned by a company that had emerged during the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s from a separate company that was originally founded by Ahae. Within days of the accident, Ahae was falsely labeled the ultimate cause of the tragedy and the de facto owner of the ferry, and was pursued by South Korean authorities in the largest manhunt in the nation’s history. In the summer of 2014, Ahae was found dead under mysterious circumstances.

Those close to Ahae maintain that he did not have an ownership interest in the ferry company and was not involved in its day-to-day operations at the time of the tragedy. And indeed, in August 2016, a three-judge panel of the Seoul Administrative Court unanimously rejected the argument that Ahae owned an interest in the ferry company, finding that there was insufficient evidence to connect Ahae to the company. Similarly, the bi-partisan Social Disasters Commission announced in September 2022 that it was unable to determine the cause of the accident, declining to adopt various government theories attempting to link Ahae to the tragedy. And while at the time of the accident Ahae’s children owned shares in a holding company that indirectly owned the ferry company, they did not own a controlling interest in the holding company (either individually or collectively) and they did not play any role in the operation of the ferry company or the Sewol. But regrettably, due to the power of false narratives propagated by the media and government authorities, in the public imagination Ahae remains connected to both the tragic sinking of the Sewol ferry and to the earlier Odaeyang mass suicide.

Now we continue to push back against this injustice and carry out the artistic mission of the project started by Ahae in the last years of his life. In accordance with the artist’s wishes, we seek to share the beauty of the natural world with others; to emphasize the importance of clean air, fresh water, and natural food to maintain a healthy body and mind; and to help people incorporate these elements in their lives to the greatest extent possible.