ANNA PARK

PLUCK ME TENDER

APRIL 8TH - MAY 8TH, 2021

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In a 2019 interview, Anna Park was asked what she might have pursued professionally if art hadn’t grabbed her by the wrist. “I’d probably be like an accountant, only I’m terrible at math,” she confessed. Not an astronaut or a bank robber or a kindergarten teacher: Anna Park would have been a CPA. “I can romanticize having a 9 to 5 job, the ability to clock out,” she offers by way of explanation. It’s an atypical response from a millennial, especially a 23 year old with a proclivity for tattoos, bold winged eyeliner and Marlboro Reds. Sometimes critics distrust contradiction because the inconsistencies are seen as revelation, indicators of the disingenuous. The adage “art imitates life" comes to mind; however, is it necessary that the artist imitates their art? Surface readings lock the viewer out of deeper understanding, eliminate the possibly of contemplation with such easy certitude and yet this attitude amongst collectors persists. We want Basquiat’s hodgepodge of jazzy hieroglyphics reflected in his tangle of dreads, shoeless and bespoke on the cover of the The New York Times magazine, his pant leg angel-dusted with white overspray as he props one foot up against an overturned chair. We want Francesca Woodman permanently dangling from a doorway in some abandoned SoHo loft. Or as Josh Smith (a former neighbor of Anna Park’s in Bushwick) once asserted, “It’s disappointing to learn that you can’t only be an artist. You also have to be an entertainer…You have to have the personality to go along with what you’re doing.” And yet for all the bravado of a Julian Schnabel or the snark of a Damien Hirst, there’s something to be said for the quiet ones. Low key needn’t equate low energy. Loudness is not synonymous with libidinal. Have you ever been at a boisterous cocktail party, full of chatter and ambient flirtation, when suddenly someone drops a champagne flute or accidentally turns out the lights with a misplaced elbow? What happens in the split-second aftermath? The room freezes, a hushed silence entombs those gathered, and then just as quickly, without prompting, the crowd returns to its merriment. Anna Park’s drawings live in this transitory space.

I invite you to take a look at her drawings. They are gritty muscular creatures endemic among the casually observed, malformed crib notes from a waking dream. Always drawing - never painting - sometimes on paper, at intervals on panel. For a good long stretch while attending The New York Academy of Art, Anna kicked off her studio sessions by flipping through old Cecily Brown catalogues. I think her reverence for the painter shows in the work: figures liquifying under the duress of a charcoal stick, that fade in/fade out quality, the frantic dispersal of ideas in cramped quarters. We are too quick to reduce such undertakings to the binary of abstract versus figurative. In his writings on Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze pointed out that by planting his people in geometric ovals and boxes, Bacon made non-narrative works which still embraced the representational. Let’s continue to embrace that subtlety.

Born in South Korea in 1996, the artist moved around a lot as a child: New Zealand at age six where she picked up her first inkling of English, then back to Seoul, a stint in Redondo Beach before landing in Salt Lake City where her single mom - a pharmacist - encouraged her passion for mark-making with after-school classes and an informal tutelage under art teacher Bruce Robertson.

I initially encountered Anna Park’s work when I was asked to interview Michael Kagan at The New York Academy of Art in November 2019 for the release of his first museum catalogue. As is customary, I arrived at the venue a few minutes early and to kill some time, I wandered around their ground floor ballroom. The school had installed roughly forty pieces from a new student art competition called the AXA Art Prize which I had never heard of before. I was impressed though to see the selection committee included jurors John Currin, Tschabalala Self, Sanford Biggers, Will Cotton and Massimiliano Gioni. One drawing in particular struck me as haunting and equally comical. Echoing the mood of a Kirchner painting or even a Genieve Figgis - the way the figures seem zombified at times - but playing up a different brand of distortion, Anna Park’s Parent Teacher Conference was one part Bacchanalia and two-thirds The Walking Dead with just a frosting of Weegee. For an artist so incredibly young, Anna had managed to tap into that ancient dread of educators and parents socializing together with an easy wit and razor-sharp draftsmanship. I contacted her about doing a studio visit the following week and Michael Kagan mentioned to me in passing that when the school honored KAWS at their annual gala a few months prior, he too was completely smitten by Anna Park so much so that he had acquired a drawing. The fact that in the interval between this fateful night and me actually visiting her studio, Anna Park won the inaugural AXA Art Prize only upped my excitement at making her acquaintance.

When I walked into her stall on the second floor of The New York Academy of Art in TriBeca I was overwhelmed by the swirl of humanity cascading from her large scale drawings: a hot dog eating contest gone wrong, elsewhere a limbo contestant bent backwards, a star athlete being swarmed by his teammates upon their victory. On her work table lay a scramble of half-crumbed black sticks like a pile of spent cigarettes. The simplicity of her method, these cylindrical fragments of charcoal, felt incongruous with the majesty I witnessed on her walls.

Pluck Me Tender marks the auspicious New York City solo debut of Anna Park. So what the pluck? Is it a young girl brought from South Korea indoctrinated for better or for worse into the customs of Americana? Is it the flowers we see scribbled dead center in the frantic shopping melee of her Mother’s Day drawing? Or perhaps it makes reference to the tabled turkey rabidly surrounded in her Thanksgiving homage? The most lucid of the nine works presented here is a wedding scene, specifically the moment that the bride and groom are cutting their tiered-cake. Look closely and you’ll notice they are about to saw their own decorative heart in two.

-Bill Powers

For inquiries email erin@halfgallery.com