Not Black and White

At just 27, Anna Park has made a major impression on the art world. Dodie Kazanjian visits her studio.

- Anna Park

As a very young South Korean-born girl growing up in Utah, Anna Park fell deeply and permanently in love with drawing. “I just found it very seductive,” she tells me. “It made me feel good.” She still feels that way. Her fluent, immersive, black-and-white images, often 10 feet long, have put her in the forefront of a cohort of Asian artists who are attracting attention from curators and collectors. Her drawings have the power and presence of oil paintings but are made from charcoal or India ink. Many of them feature the smiling, perfect young women in mid-century ads, comics, or movies, but they’re clearly not as dopey as they seem. The result is a whirlwind of abstract and figurative elements that evoke the anxieties and absurdities of popular culture in America through the eyes of someone who knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.

When I visit Park this past winter, her ground-floor Brooklyn studio is chock-full of works in progress for a show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in Perth. (It opens on April 20.) Park is tall and striking in her black sweater and pants, with exaggerated and expertly drawn black eyeliner and tattoos on her arms and back—a tiger, a naked lady, a foot-wide lotus, a mandala, the Roman numerals for 27, her lucky number and, as it happens, her current age. Also, an impressively coiled snake, a memento of her teenage breakup with a boyfriend.