My mother, Soraya, and her painter husband, Young-Il Ahn, live in the smoggy, gray, industrial wasteland of downtown L.A. But they have a cool oasis: a breezy, high-ceilinged artist’s loft flooded with light. Ahn’s paintings are thickly layered, and richly hued prisms of vibrant vermilion, azure, and emerald pulsate from every wall. Flamboyant tropical fish float in their aquariums, while a riot of lovebirds, parakeets, and red-eared finches pierce the air with their frantic twittering. A skylight illuminates the long white dining table where my stepfather and I eat lunch, as my mom flips haemul pajeon on the stove.

And this is when I learn that my stepfather is one of the first Korean artists to thrive in America.

I had always known that my mom’s husband was a talented artist, but I wasn’t aware of his pioneering role in art history until today.

“Korea has a very short history of contemporary art like Westernized painting,” says Ahn, who was born in 1934. “I’m a part of the first generation of artists who painted in the Western way in Korea. Before that it was mostly water-based Oriental painting.”

He tells me that he was the first Korean artist to show in America, when he had an invitational exhibition in New York at the World House Gallery in 1957. In those days, the American Abstract Expressionism movement, which included artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, made New York an important center of art.

He adamantly denies membership to any formal movement, but Ahn’s paintings share many attributes of Abstract Expressionism. Some are textured blocks of shimmering color and others are roughly hewn forms of classical musicians, fish or birds rendered in thickly layered oil paint slathered with a palette knife.

Ahn had his early training in Impressionist art by attempting to make exact copies of the works of Degas and Monet — as a toddler. He was born in Gaesung in the North, but lived in Japan for 10 years, and moved to Seoul where he was educated at Seoul National University, graduating in 1958. The country was still recovering from the Korean War and was very poor. “Now I have such nice paints and art supplies,” he says, “but in Korea there was nothing.”

Ahn was so poor he couldn’t afford to buy even one canvas to enter a prestigious national art contest when he was a teenager. He stole his father’s award-winning painting of a nude, covered it with gesso, and rendered an image of the rabbit hutch in his front yard in the Impressionist style on the stolen canvas. “He’s so bad, right?” says my mom from the kitchen, eavesdropping on our conversation.

Ahn won the contest and access to patronage and prestige among Seoul’s upper crust. Suddenly, the poor young artist became close friends with Walter C. Dowling, the American ambassador to Korea, and President Syngman Rhee’s wife, Francesca. Both were wild about his paintings.