Artist Anna Park stars in new exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA

Anna Park looks back and marvels at the journey of the South Korean kid who migrated to the US, grew up in suburban Utah and then landed firmly on her feet in New York. The artist’s large, cacophonous charcoal drawings capture the frenetic nature of modern life and have increasingly captured the attention of the international art market. She has started her career in style, selling out her debut solo show, sending four of her artworks to major museums around America, and now counts influential singer Billie Eilish and artist-toy designer KAWS among her admirers. But today it is another journey the 27-year-old has on her mind — the day-long flight from New York to Perth for the opening of her international exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA this month. Park has created a range of new pieces for the event and will also showcase a knitwear collaboration with an Australian rising star, garment designer Kaylene Milner from Wah-Wah Australia. She plans to be here for about a week and will then travel east to visit Melbourne and Sydney. It is her first trip to Australia. “Flying from New York to LA, I’ve realised that’s virtually the distance between Perth and Sydney,” she laughs. Park’s mother, who lives in Utah, is coming along for the long ride. “She’s like, ‘just let me know and I will be there’,” Park says. “It’s going to be so much fun — a nice girls’ trip.“ It is clear the influence her mother has had on her life. Park’s parents migrated to the US from South Korea when she was about 10, spending a brief time in California before landing in Salt Lake City for work. Both her parents are pharmacists. “It came down to Utah or North Dakota,” Park says. “They decided Utah was closer to LA and maybe better to raise the kids. It wasn’t like Utah was the place she had set her heart on.” It was one of those sliding doors moments that can shape a life. Park recalls that she was a kid who loved to draw. One day her work was spotted in a local shopping mall by art teacher Bruce Robertson, who invited her to join his classes. “My mum was really open-minded,” Park says. “She saw my interest in it and was very enthusiastic.” Under Robertson’s tutelage, Park developed a love for drawing in charcoal, which continues to this day and is a defining feature of her work. “He taught in a very classical manner, with charcoal and oil painting,” she says. “It was always available, it’s a cheaper medium and we always had paper, so it made sense. “I understand now that it also matches my sensibility — the fastness, the very forgiving nature of it, the messiness. All of it. “It’s a very seductive medium for me. I feel like the parameters are simple but there’s so much subtlety. The different types of charcoal, the different types of papers change the way — the experience — of drawing. It’s just been a love of mine.” The art classes became the constant in her life. “I don’t think I was ever not drawing or painting. And one day I thought this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. “I didn’t know what form it was going to take but I wasn’t really very good at anything else. That’s what it really boiled down to. I got incredibly lucky, of course.” Her choice of career took her now-divorced mother by surprise. “I think my mum was like, ‘oh, I thought this was what you were going to do on the side’. When I was about 16 or 17 and applying for colleges, she realised that I was really going to stick with it. “There’s been a lot of blind faith and I am very grateful.” The colour, chaos and crowds of New York, where she went to study, would have a profound influence on Park’s work. The city’s endless energy was in stark contrast to her suburban teenage life in Salt Lake City and her work absorbed it, filling with movement, intensity and a humorous sense of hedonism. She painted in dense, charcoal swirls, drawing on popular culture to chronicle modern life and its unrelenting access to information and entertainment. “My chronic online-ness, the doomscrolling that we are all subjected to, I wanted to represent that,” she says. “When I first went to New York, there was this burst of over-sensory environment. New York versus Utah was such a black and white contrast. “It was my way of understanding the world around me. I use art as a way to digest and as a refuge. It is the only time I stand alone with my thoughts. I put them out and it comes out in the art.” Her influences spring from the culture of her time, not the cultures of the past, and she finds inspiration from whatever she is experiencing, reading or observing. “Going into a body of work, I have artists in the back of my mind like Andy Warhol, Ida Applebroog or David Salle,” she says. “But I am more directly influenced by comics rather than artists.” Park’s youthful ambition was to work in graphic design and illustration, ideally for a company such as animated movie giant Pixar. She remembers being enchanted by clips of animators drawing by hand at the end of Disney’s Snow White, a favourite on the family’s VHS tapes. But by the time she was in her teenage years, much of the landscape of animation had changed to digital. She spoke to the son of a teacher who had recently left studio giant Dreamworks, which had produced animated favourites such as Shrek, Madagascar and Chicken Run. “He was like, ‘it’s not what you think it is going to be like’,” Park says. “It’s a machine that produces incredible films but they assign you a specific role so it can be as efficient as possible. In my naivete I thought I would be doing all these hand drawings. “Maybe there is an aspect of that but in reality I thought it wasn’t what I wanted to do. “Ultimately I didn’t go fully into illustration or animation because I wanted all the ideas to be my own. It’s ultimate freedom but that’s scary in other ways. The fear with fine art is how do I pay the rent?” In 2017, Park left the Pratt Institute to study at the New York Academy of Art. It was another moment of serendipity. Influential art dealer Bill Powers would see her work at the academy’s new student art competition. “One drawing in particular struck me as haunting and equally comical: Anna Park’s Parent Teacher Conference was one part Bacchanalia and two parts The Walking Dead,” he said. Park’s first solo show at Power’s Half Gallery in 2021 was a sold-out success. One of the works on display, Intermission, would go on to be used as the artwork for a limited-edition release of Eilish’s album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Pop artist and toymaker KAWS had also fallen for her work and he posted his admiration on Instagram, sharing some of her work with his legion of followers. Opportunity followed opportunity. Park was asked to produce a movie poster for David Fincher’s Oscar-nominated film Mank. She held her first solo exhibition in Europe and then showcased her work in shows in Japan and China. Park has since found some calm in the whirlwind and it has been reflected in her most recent works. “After a few years, I’ve been paring everything down,” she says. “In the past, I was immersed in this overwhelming space, now it’s more intimate. “These simpler images feel more naked. There’s more room for the viewer to place themselves in them, rather than be swept up.” Her work is less intense but retains its trademark sense of humour. “I do like absurdist humour, cartoons, slapstick humour. I enjoy it so much,” she says. “Sometimes I have to remind myself to not take things so seriously, getting bogged down in everything that is going on. A little bit of levity is good, especially with so much distraction and the constant bombardment of news.” She describes the works for her Perth exhibition as a mash-up of the old and the new. “They are the opposite ends of the spectrum and I have worked my way into the middle. Perth is the happy baby of both.” Park jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with Milner, though neither was that familiar with the other’s work. “I think it is going to be super fun, very original,” she says. “It’s my first time making merch, let alone clothing. “When they asked me if I wanted to do it, I was like, oh my God, yes.” Milner has made a splash of her own, garnering a devoted following for her bright, quirky knitwear that is steeped in pop culture and produced in collaboration with a variety of bands and artists. The art gallery has stocked a range of her garments in its design store over the past year and asked if she would like to help celebrate Park’s exhibition. “They said mine was the first brand to come to mind that would be suitable, so it was really exciting to hear that,” Milner says. “I was not that familiar with her work so I did a really deep dive before committing to it. The timeline was very short for what knitwear requires but then I threw myself 110 per cent into the project. “I was absolutely blown away by her work. It really resonated with me. It’s really fresh and exciting and has so much depth.” Like Park, Milner had her heart set on her career as a teenager. She started her business in the bedroom of her share house, inspired by the punk rock record covers, concert posters and comics that she loved. She has played drums in punk bands since senior high school and got her break working with those she had played shows with. Her greatest challenge was to work out how Park’s distinctive style would translate to knitwear. “I’m usually drawn to artists that have a more illustrative style, more simplified lines, that lends itself to graphic knitwear,” Milner says. “The depth and shades in Anna’s work is probably the polar opposite to what I would do. It has been really interesting to play around with that.” Look, look. Anna Park opens at the Art Gallery of WA on Friday April 19 and runs until September 8. Entry is free. Park and Milner will join Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Edwina McCann in a Q&A session on Saturday April 20 when they launch their Look, look. Knit collaboration from 6.30pm. Tickets are available through Eventbrite.