Anna Park South Korea, b. 1996

An early work, drawn the year Park graduated from her CFA at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, Whisper to Me Your Woes (2018) is a rare self-portrait of the artist and extension of a very similar study drawn in 2017. Park is depicted sitting on a fire-escape amongst the New York metropolis with her face largely in shadow, although her signature thick winged eye liner is visible. Park is slumped with her head resting on a step, an oversized shirt gaping open to reveal her underwear. A mysterious object is clutched in hand, probably a lighter, as the artist is a self-proclaimed heavy smoker. It is a melancholy, intimate scene, and prefigures Park’s chaotic compositions, which she developed in 2018. We are perhaps catching the artist in a break from a late-night painting session, a moment of insomniac musing or just a point of the day where she takes a breath from hectic city life, to which she is still becoming accustomed. It is a comparable scene to Bona III, ISGM, Boston, a work from Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama series, where the artist photographs themselves in a quiet moment of stillness and introspection, making the viewer the ultimate voyeur.

Describing the environment of New York as “chaotic, suffocating,” Park has acknowledged that her surroundings are a key influence on her work. She works thirteen hour shifts in her Bushwick studio, sometimes until 1am, listening to podcasts to keep her mind occupied. Many of her works depict large groups in frenzied, bacchanalian gatherings and are drawn from stock images rather than the artist’s own personal experiences. Like British artist Denzil Forrester, who has found artistic inspiration from London’s reggae and dub nightclub scene since the 1980s, Park is intrigued by the high energy, grotesque, even feral nature of drinking culture and nightlife. An avid people watcher, Park sees herself as more of a hermit, stating that some of the people she depicts are her hard-partying ‘alter-egos.’ The pandemonium of her charcoal worlds was also representative of moving to a big bustling city in her early twenties, where one is never alone and life moves at a hundred miles an hour.

Often working on a monumental scale, Park’s typical works reimagine snapshot images taken from Google, memes and social media, working in a frenetic, disjointed, Cubist-like composition. Having begun working with charcoal early into her CFA at the New York Academy of Arts, Park almost exclusively draws rather than paints, usually on paper and sometimes also on panel. For Park, draughtsmanship is everything, and like Caitlin Keogh, it is vital to the construction of her complex, even overwhelming compositions. While Park draws the majority of her works in charcoal, she has also expanded her repertoire to include ink and acrylic, such as for a series of works displayed at her first Los Angeles show, Anna Park: Mirror Shy at Blum & Poe, November - December 2022. The sole use of a monochrome palette provides a kind of eerie nostalgia, reminiscent of black and white photography.

Born in South Korea, Anna Park (b. 1996) immigrated to the US as a child with her family, settling in Salt Lake City, Utah. After seeing one of her drawings at a mall art fair, art teacher and Utah university professor Bruce Robertson recruited her for life drawing classes, a gesture Park has since acknowledged changed her life and forged the start of her career. Originally aspiring to become an animator, Park began studying illustration and animation at the Pratt Institute. However, after the first two years of study Park decided instead to pursue a fine art career and transferred to the New York Academy of Art. Studying under Michael Grimaldi, she was drawn towards charcoal and its “quickness, the forgiveness.” Park’s key influence in her early studies was British painter Cecily Brown, whose catalogues she would flick through for inspiration, inspired by Brown’s figurative abstract style and dynamic brushwork.

Critics have often compared the content of Park’s works to that of a twisted, all-American dream. Her drawings often contain subjects and motifs which are highly recognisable and embedded in our pop culture, for example, a celebrity engulfed by news reporters, the couple cutting their wedding cake, cowboy hats, stars and stripes. Described by critic Dean Kissick as a “new American form of Cubism,” it is as if the America which Park, and the viewer, observes everyday through our TVs and smartphones has spilled out upon the paper. Park’s titles also have an element of acidic humour. A Surrealist work on paper for instance, made for Park’s Los Angeles show Mirror Shy, shows a cigarette morphed with a female silhouette. An image that could have been lifted from early American advertising it is cunningly entitled Any Takers (2022). An artist who is keenly aware of their youth and Gen Z upbringing (she has said in interviews that she watches Gilmore Girls in her studio to relax), Park infuses not only the fast pace of twenty-first century life into her works, but also the continued sexualisation and pressure upon women in modern society. This holds similarities with the work of Ella Kruglyanskaya, whose bold paintings depict curvaceous women inspired by 1950s pin-up culture who reject the ‘male gaze’ and bring a feminine perspective.