My Beloved, Collapsing World

Photographer Ahn Soohyang has worked with water, stone, light and particles since her 2018 artist residency in Iceland. She lives by her three greatest loves: traveling, taking photographs and writing. She says that once she chose to dive into the sea rather than stand at its edge, both her photography and her writing grew more joyful. Here she recalls a summer in the waters off Morocco, where she spent every moment on a surfboard, wobbling, collapsing and starting over again and again.

Words & Photos Ahn Soohyang

I remember the first morning I stood up on the sea by my own strength. They say you have to learn to walk all over again in the ocean. That spring, I loved the sea so much that at first I simply tumbled around in it like a child, and only when summer came did I learn, on wobbling arms and legs, to hold my ground against it somehow. Each individual wave that shatters against me is a microscopic world I can never meet unless I take hold of it. I summon my courage, paddle, rise to my feet and grab hold of the world.
Beneath the soles of my feet on the surfboard, I heard the heartbeat of the wave. It was thrilling. It felt as if every sensation beyond the board seeped into my toes. A moment that seemed it might last forever, a world collapsing and pure elation, blind steps, an innocent expression, a heart that can return to the beginning without hesitation—I gathered all of this together and called it ‘surfing.’ The year the word “surfing” first settled on my tongue, the summer was dazzling and tender. Blindingly so. If it is this beautiful from the very start, what am I supposed to do? It is so beautiful that I can gladly show you this lazy, childish sentence, which I have made no effort to revise.

I once spent nearly a month in Taghazout and Imsouane in Morocco, purely for surfing. When there were waves, I dove in without hesitation, and when I was hungry, I ate. When I felt good, I laughed, and I didn’t have to laugh for anyone else’s sake. I stood as I wished, and everyone around me seemed to do the same. It was good. The unguarded people I met on the beach were all friends. Among them was someone I felt I could happily gaze at like this for the rest of my life. My friend’s name was Aoumar, and together we lay in the desert, covered in sand, watching the evening glow. As the sunset faded over a heart grown soft and tender, so much so that I felt almost sorry to borrow the midday warmth still held in the sand, Aoumar taught me the words for “star,” “sea” and “sparkling,” and planted them in me. The sea in my mind sparkles and shines forever, together with the stars.

I am out on the sea, still wobbling, still moving forward. Out here, the foolish and rigid belief, the rule that says wavering is a sin and anxiety belongs to the immature, cannot stand. Where everything shakes, trying to hold your place is only futile. So you have to let go to endure, here. I can’t tell you how happy I was to learn that any concept or abstraction can crumble, like a sandcastle before a wave, in the face of the collective force of water arriving every eight or nine seconds. Once concepts collapse, common sense collapses and all of you disappear, only the waves and I remain on the sea. I seize the world as it comes toward me, making all manner of expressions I could never make on land.

To dive into the sea is to open the door to another world, and to promise to be shaken at every moment. The world beneath the surfboard is collapsing as it touches the ground, slowly, in a beautiful way. I cross the waves to take hold of the world once more. It lies out there, beyond. My beloved, dazzling world. My beloved, eternal summer and collapsing world.