As a really younger South Korean-born lady rising up in Utah, Anna Park fell deeply and completely in love with drawing. “I simply discovered it very seductive,” she tells me. “It made me really feel good.” She nonetheless feels that method. Her fluent, immersive, black-and-white pictures, typically 10 toes lengthy, have put her within the forefront of a cohort of Asian artists who’re attracting consideration from curators and collectors. Her drawings have the facility and presence of oil work however are constructed from charcoal or India ink. Lots of them function the smiling, excellent younger ladies in mid-century adverts, comics, or motion pictures, however they’re clearly not as dopey as they appear. The result’s a whirlwind of summary and figurative parts that evoke the anxieties and absurdities of common tradition in America via the eyes of somebody who is aware of what it’s wish to be on the surface trying in.
After I go to Park this previous winter, her ground-floor Brooklyn studio is chock-full of works in progress for a present on the Artwork Gallery of Western Australia, in Perth. (It opens on in the present day.) Park is tall and hanging in her black sweater and pants, with exaggerated and expertly drawn black eyeliner and tattoos on her arms and again—a tiger, a unadorned woman, a foot-wide lotus, a mandala, the Roman numerals for 27, her fortunate quantity and, because it occurs, her present age. Additionally, an impressively coiled snake, a memento of her teenage breakup with a boyfriend.
I discover that lots of the giant new works in her studio embrace outstanding textual content—“My pleasure!,” “Good Woman,” “Simply Think about!,” “Harmful,” “Look, look.” It’s the primary time she’s used phrases in her pictures, and there’s greater than a nod to Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha—the catalog to Ruscha’s current retrospective on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork is open on a desk. “I used to be nearly afraid to place textual content in my work earlier than, as a result of it could are usually aggressive,” she explains. “However I really feel that language is as malleable as pictures are, and I assumed it might be attention-grabbing to play with the double entendre for sure phrases. It’s all about tone—the tone wherein one thing is delivered can alter its sincerity.”
She continues, “Every time I see giant billboards of those completely rendered, idealized ladies on the aspect of a constructing, they’re all so joyful or tremendous horny. Make-up and eyebrows and hair so kempt and curated. I wished to make her expression not less than be one thing extra like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’ ” she says of her drawing Look, look. Her ladies’s expressions are sardonic, humorous, perplexed, and even barely bilious, and all of them are variations of herself.
I additionally discover some intriguing supply materials pinned on the studio partitions: an advert for a film referred to as Hell Child; one other that includes a small fish on a hook, hanging between two naked feminine legs. “It’s a French advert for tampons,” she says. Park’s footage are “cheeky,” as she describes them. “Perhaps I’m only a cheeky particular person, a bit cornball. Nevertheless it’s good to have a layer of humor.” In an earlier image titled First Marriage, the bride’s breasts escape from her bodice, and the groom is basically pushed out of sight. “From the second I met Anna, I used to be stunned by how variety, good, hilarious, and effortlessly cool she is,” says the painter Anna Weyant, who was in an early group present with Park. “After I see her work, I typically think about somebody laughing at a funeral.” The ladies in her drawings, writes Rachel Cieśla, the curator for her Perth present, are “sturdy feminine leads who may exude the arrogance of Kylie Jenner or the powerful charisma of Tura Satana. Mysterious and irreducible, they evoke an angle of ‘Don’t mess with me’ but additionally ‘Please see me and love me.’ ”
“Marvel Girls,” a 2022 group present of 40 Asian artists at Jeffrey Deitch’s galleries in New York and Los Angeles, did simply that. Park’s work was one of many standouts. “It’s all the time thrilling to see the work of an rising artist with astonishing drawing talent,” Deitch says. “Anna is a part of a dynamic group of younger Asian ladies artists residing and dealing in Brooklyn, a gaggle that features Sasha Gordon, Dominique Fung, and Amanda Ba. The emergence of those ‘surprise ladies’ is among the most fun developments in modern artwork.”
Over breakfast at E.A.T. on Madison Avenue, Park tells me her origin story. She was born in Daegu, within the southern a part of South Korea, the place each her dad and mom had been pharmacists. In 2001, when she was round 4, her mom, Kyoungmi Jo, took her and her older brother to New Zealand. Their father stayed behind. “My mother was unconventional and adventurous,” she says. “She wished us to study English, however I believe she additionally felt very trapped in Korea. The Korean faculty system is so intense, even from a younger age. My mother wished us, and herself, to expertise one thing utterly completely different, and I’m so grateful for that.” After two years, they got here again to Korea, the place Park began first grade, however by that point, her mom was already interested by the USA. Inside a few years, she moved with the 2 kids and her husband to Redondo Seaside, California. (Her dad and mom divorced when Park was 16, however amicably.) Park spent a great deal of time watching the Disney Channel, cartoons, and flicks like Imply Women. “It was a giant adjustment, and I realized rapidly to select up on folks’s mannerisms,” Park says. They lived there
for nearly a 12 months, ready for a pharmacist job to open up someplace—that turned out to be Sandy, a largely white suburb of Salt Lake Metropolis, the place Park completed elementary faculty and went to center and highschool. “I hated that individuals would gawk on the meals I’d deliver to high school, my stiff black hair and Asian options, my insecurity with the language,” she says. “For thus lengthy, I actually wished to be only a blonde white lady.” One of many new works in her studio, Image That, features a cropped phrase, “blonde.” “It’s the attitude of my childhood self,” she says, “which was attempting to see past the sting of this identification that I may by no means attain.”
Drawing was her principal comfort and help: “I used to be recognized in school as that bizarre lady who likes to attract.” Park entered native artwork competitions, and after recognizing considered one of her drawings on the mall, a person named Bruce Robertson referred to as her mom. He ran an after-school artwork program, and Park began taking lessons there when she was within the fifth grade. “He actually took me underneath his wing,” she says. “I ended up going there each week.” That is the place she began drawing with charcoal. “That’s how he taught everyone. It was very classical coaching, and he was very trustworthy with me. He wasn’t sugarcoating something. A number of instances I used to be simply pissed off to tears as a result of I wished to be nice on the factor
I liked doing. He instilled the concept that you must put within the hours to get the place you need to go.”
When Park was 14, a household journey to New York opened new horizons. “We did all of the quintessential New York issues—double-decker bus tour, Statue of Liberty, The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and the Museum of Fashionable Artwork. I keep in mind telling my mother, ‘I’m going to stay right here someday.’ ” When it was time for school, Park ended up at Pratt Institute in New York. “For the primary time in my life, I felt like I wasn’t so completely different, that I simply blended in,” she says. “I used to be excessive on life, and I felt snug with myself. It took me such a very long time to get to the purpose the place I used to be proud to be Korean.” She knew her mom anxious that she may by no means be capable of help herself as an artist, and she or he was very conscious of not taking something without any consideration. “I used to be like, I’ve to make one thing out of myself, to make it worthwhile for my mother to have despatched me right here.”
After two years of Pratt’s four-year program, although, Park dropped out. She liked the varsity as a result of “it was so open to what I wished to do, however I wanted extra construction.” She went on to the New York Academy of Artwork, a non-public graduate artwork faculty in Tribeca. “It was a really conventional portray and drawing program, and perhaps due to my roots with Bruce Robertson, this was the place I wished to go.” She didn’t have an undergraduate diploma, however after a 12 months there, she may apply for the two-year grasp’s program, and that’s what she did, kind of. She skipped most of her lessons so she may spend all her time in her studio. “I simply wished to make my very own stuff.”
Her skilled profession began whereas she was nonetheless at school, in 2019. The academy was honoring the wildly common artist referred to as KAWS (Brian Donnelly) at its annual Tribeca Ball, when the scholars open their studios and everyone seems to be invited in to see their work. KAWS was so struck by Park’s drawings that he purchased one on the spot, and posted her work on Instagram. (He has 4 million followers.) “I knew about his work, however I didn’t know I used to be speaking to him,” she remembers. “I requested him, ‘Do you do artwork?’ ” When she discovered he was that night time’s honoree, “I used to be so mortified. He was very candy about it. And that’s how all the things exploded.”
“Two First Names,” a present with Ana Benaroya at Garey Gallery in Los Angeles, rapidly adopted, and all 4 of Park’s drawings in it had been offered. A passel of group reveals in New York then befell, and there have been solo reveals, too—at Half Gallery in New York, and at Blum & Poe, first in Tokyo in 2021 after which in Los Angeles. (She has since joined the gallery, now Blum with out the Poe.) After which in 2022, she had her first solo museum present on the SCAD Museum of Artwork in Savannah.
The works in her new present are three-dimensional. Uninterested in folks asking if her drawings are preparations for work, she turned her floor right into a reduction by slicing squares and arches right into a sheet of two-inch-thick insulation foam, which she glues on high of a thick wooden panel. She then covers the entire floor with rice paper and attracts on that. The work turns into an object. “There’s a stubbornness in me,” she says. “I like drawing to the deepest of my core. If one thing is on a panel or canvas as an alternative of paper, folks say, ‘Oh, it’s artwork now.’ Folks name these work.” However what does she name them? I ask her. “I name them drawings. Let’s rejoice it!” Does she see herself making sculpture? “That’s a objective that I’m inching towards,” she says.
Park will get to the studio round midday and works till midnight or later—she turns her cellphone off and locks it in a field whereas she’s there. Her condo is close by and she or he’s in mattress by two within the morning, except she goes out to Bushwick’s golf equipment. “I like dancing, but it surely’s all sober dancing. I don’t actually drink. And I simply love listening to music.” She additionally enjoys going out for dinner with the painter Sasha Gordon or different artist mates. Park lately broke up with the artist boyfriend she’d been with for 3 and a half years. Alone within the studio, she likes to have one thing occurring within the background, however normally not music. She listens to quite a lot of comedy podcasts (she lists Las Culturistas by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, and SmartLess by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett) and loves stand-up comics. “That’s one of many hardest professions as a result of it’s a mixture of timing, writing, and efficiency, after which you haven’t any management over the viewers.” She additionally listens to audiobooks, and her style is eclectic—she’s lately listened to Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and the Britney Spears memoir. And she or he’s a giant fan of acquainted TV reveals, like Gilmore Women, which she watches typically. “It may well’t be a present that’s too good or a present I’ve by no means seen earlier than.”