Korean-American artist Anna Park renders digital age in stark black and white at Art Gallery of WA exhibition

In large-scale charcoal drawings filled with movement, details and pop-art references, artist Anna Park explores what it is to live in an age consumed by social media that both warps and shapes our reality.

The exhibition: Look, look. Anna Park — part of the Art Gallery of WA’s partnership with the Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Art — comprises 15 works commissioned especially for the gallery.

It’s the first Australian exhibition for Park, who was born in South Korea, raised in Utah and how lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

She works in charcoal, a decidedly analogue medium for covering the weight of digital life.

“My old mentor, he introduced me to charcoal and it kind of stuck and I’ve been obsessed ever since,” Park said.

“It’s such a primitive material and very simple, but I’m dealing with subject matter that’s tied to so much of the digital realm.

Park said she started each drawing with a loose idea and then would see where her brush took her, letting the exploration of ideas happen on the work itself.

Digital media’s influence on women

For this collection, she’s focused on the overwhelming nature of digital media and how it translates into women’s lives.

She said she also looked back to art and media of the past, with influences of the pop-art movement, old comic books and print advertising clear in her work.

“I wanted to kind of bring in pop influences, and a level of nostalgia with a lot of old-school vintage imagery, but kind of bring that into the contemporary realm and explore coming-of-age stories, but translated through these women and how women are portrayed in media too,” she said.

“So all the women that you see in the work are various self portraits of myself in a way.

The use of text, which features in almost all the 15 pieces, is a new element for her.

“I think the directness of certain phrases or words, but also how malleable they are paired with the pretty clear images, I found that pretty interesting because I think it’s all how you say things and how it can be interpreted,” she said.

“So that also ties into the way we consume media and information.”

‘Really vital at this moment in time’

The institute’s lead creative, Rachel Ciesla, said she was inspired to commission Park after seeing her work at Freeze art fair in Seoul.

“Anna is someone whose work I’ve been following for a number of years now, and I had the pleasure of first seeing one of her works in 2022,” Ciesla said.

“After that, it was like, OK, great, this is definitely an artist that I want to work with.

“[Park is] someone that I felt would be really vital to show at this moment in time and to provide this opportunity for her to create a new body of work where there would be the freedom to experiment with some new ideas.”

Drawing reclaims its place in art  

The exhibition also marks a return of drawing to AGWA, which has taken a back seat to more modern media in recent years.

“There’s still this hierarchy of mediums as much as we pretend that there isn’t, and painting takes top spot,” Ciesla said.

“But there really has been a renewed interest in drawing, I would say, globally.

“[Drawing] has an immediacy to it that I think really translates emotion and biographical information in this really physical way that other mediums don’t do.

For Park, the call from Ciesla in October last year was an unexpected surprise.

“I was so excited. I mean, this is my first time in Australia and I never would have imagined I would be showing here in Perth.

“I was just really grateful to be able to have this opportunity to share work with the audience that I don’t think I would have ever been able to share it with before.”

After this, it’s back to Brooklyn and an artist’s life in New York.

“[Life] is just puttering around in the studio, going to see a lot of art, spending time with friends.

“It’s fairly non-eventful in a lot of ways. Most of the time my happy place is in the studio.”