Born in Korea and raised in Utah, artist Anna Park has been captivated by drawing since childhood, and that passion soon became her identity. Her large-scale works, often exceeding three meters in length, are rendered in black-and-white charcoal and ink, moving fluidly between realism and abstraction. Borrowing imagery from American popular culture, she distorts it through the lens of an outsider. The women in her drawings embody both strength and unease, confidence and desire, humor and discomfort all at once.
As a child, Park moved from Korea to New Zealand and California before settling in Sandy, Utah, where she often felt the unease of being an outsider under the gaze of others. Drawing became her only refuge. Under the guidance of art teacher Bruce Robertson, she mastered classical charcoal techniques, and a trip to New York at fourteen became a defining turning point in her artistic journey. After high school, she studied at Pratt Institute and later at the New York Academy of Art, where she began to build her distinct creative world.
In 2019, when the artist KAWS purchased one of her student works on the spot and introduced it on social media, Park’s career quickly drew widespread attention. Since then, she has held solo exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Savannah, earning critical and curatorial acclaim.
In her recent works, Park transcends the boundaries of paper drawing by layering insulation foam and traditional Korean rice paper to create sculptural surfaces, effectively blurring the line between drawing and painting. For her, the absence of color is not a limitation but the most truthful language of expression.
Working in her Brooklyn studio from noon until midnight, she is a disciplined yet playful artist, sharp in observation, mischievous in spirit.
At twenty-eight, Anna Park stands at the forefront of a new generation of artists who have brought black-and-white drawing to the center of the global art scene. To her, black and white are not restricted choices but a complete language, one that reveals both the world and herself with the utmost clarity.
