Anna Park
We’re all under some sort of microscope
Portrait of Anna Park in Look, look. Anna Park at The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2024. © Anna Park, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Duncan Wright
Director/Editor: Melle Branson
Cinematographer: Tim Fitzgerald
1st AC: Brianna Trinidad
Gaffer: Dan Spriggs
Lighting Tech: Jocelyn Richards
NYC DP: Nicholas Lattimore
BTS: Jess Wharehinga
Equipment: Raz Rentals
Studio: Raz Studio
Music: Bandura, Freud and Sirens Lure by Luke Atencio
Licensed from Musicbed
“The women in my work are self-portraits in a way or different versions of myself. She’s always in these precarious situations, but I wanted to keep their agency alive. So even if I place these women in certain situations where the space is uncomfortable, she’s choosing to be in this space.”
In this video, we join Anna Park as she explains how her Korean heritage, childhood in Utah, adoration of comic books and being chronically online, have informed her most personal show yet: Look, look. Anna Park.
Anna Park was born in Daegu, South Korea in 1996 but spent her formative years in the American state of Utah—an experience that often positioned her on the outside, looking in. This early lesson in observing from a voyeur’s distance permeates her works today, with an interest and sharp eye for the deep emotive range of the human subject. With visual allegory, recurrent archetypes, and tropes of Americana she articulates inner conflict, shame, longing, growth, and mortality within her swirling abstracted tableaus. Now based in New York, her signature large-scale black and white drawings feverishly capture the spirit of contemporary life. Concerned with the perpetual visibility and alienated self-awareness prevalent in our times, Park is a major new figure in drawing today.
Park received her BA from Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her work was the subject of the solo exhibition Last Call, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah and has been featured in the group exhibitions 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (2022); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York (2020); Drawn Together Again, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); among others. She is the First Prize Winner of the AXA Art Prize (2019) and the Grand Prize Winner of Strokes of Genius 11: Finding Beauty (2019). Her work is held in numerous public collections across the country, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.
