Anna Park
Pond Society, Shanghai, China
Pond Society is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by Korean-American artist Anna Park.
Anna Park is from South Korea but spent her formative years in the US state of Utah—an experience that often positioned her on the outside, looking in. This early lesson in seeing permeates Park’s compositions today. Teetering on the brink between abstraction and figuration, Park’s charcoal drawings examine the human condition from a voyeur’s distance, magnified through recurrent archetypes, and the performativity of social interaction.
Working initially from a sketch, Park develops and unpacks imaginary scenes with the support of her extensive personal image archive, mostly stock images sourced from the internet. These scenes often begin as universally recognizable moments or symbols that the artist then complicates with the introduction of additional layers of imagery that reveal and conceal. What unfolds are restless visions of smeared faces, wrestling limbs, ruched fabrics, and speed streaks—works that recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the fragmentation of Cubism.
In Hello, Stranger (2021), the artist casts a woman peering towards her viewer as she curls her hair, engaged in the ritual of preparing for a social event. The figure is surrounded by a flurry of shapes and gestures, swaths of swirling chaos that seem to originate from the subject’s own head and body, visualizations of anxiety and insecurity run rampant. We catch the subject in mid-transformation as she exchanges one persona for the next. Park’s portrayals are social commentaries on the contemporary experience, depictions of the world as a stage and the self-aware performances that occupy it.