Anna Park’s work exemplifies a mode of contemporary drawing in which abstraction and figuration, impulsive gesture and meticulous description, playfulness and critique operate simultaneously within a single pictorial field.
 
Working primarily in large-scale charcoal and ink compositions, Park has presented complex images of femininity shaped by hyper-exposed visual culture, the tensions of human relationships, and today’s environment of image consumption. Lehmann Maupin describes her practice as one that moves between abstraction and figuration while capturing the overheated and self-aware sensibility of the contemporary moment.

Her London exhibition《Hot Honey》offers a particularly clear articulation of this body of work.
 
According to the gallery’s official press release, the exhibition is centered on new works alongside Park’s signature large-scale charcoal pieces. The female protagonists in these works invoke familiar archetypes such as the “vixen” or the “bombshell,” while at the same time unsettling and subverting them.
 
Park does not simply represent women; rather, she stages collisions and reconfigurations among the visual tropes and roles of femininity repeatedly produced by popular culture and the media. The gallery presents the exhibition as a point at which the artist’s technical expansion and cultural critique become even more densely intertwined.

One of the most notable aspects of Park’s compositions is that their visual sources are never singular. Vintage comics, pin-up imagery, commercial illustration, and the lexicon of online visual culture are freely summoned but never remain at the level of quotation alone. Rapid, seemingly gestural abstract marks coexist with cartoon-like yet carefully rendered figurative images within the same surface, and these disparate elements collide while simultaneously forming a single, tense structure.
 
As a result, Park’s works do not present a fully resolved narrative so much as they unfold as psychological scenes densely packed with fragments of contemporary visual culture. Recent coverage of her exhibitions has likewise interpreted her work as bringing together abstraction and figuration, voyeuristic looking and satire, and the theatrical reconstruction of femininity.
 
This formal hybridity is not merely a matter of style. Lehmann Maupin explains that Park’s work continuously addresses the commodification of women, the unrealistic standards of beauty imposed by the media, and the broader dynamics of gaze and power.
 
In this sense, her practice asks how female images are consumed and stereotyped, and how those images might in turn be twisted, displaced, and reconstructed. Park’s drawings therefore operate simultaneously on two levels: as an expanded field of contemporary drawing in formal terms, and as a critical reading of the visual codes of femininity in conceptual terms.
 
Park’s recent trajectory has been expanding rapidly across both institutional and market contexts. Her official biography includes solo exhibitions such asmLast Call at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2022 and Look, look. Anna Park at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2024. In 2025, she joined Lehmann Maupin. This suggests that, while still belonging to a younger generation of artists, Park has already moved beyond the framework of the commercial gallery alone and is broadening her visibility within the international exhibition system.
 
Seen in this light, her London exhibition carries implications beyond those of a conventional solo presentation. Through drawing, Park absorbs the excesses of contemporary visual culture while revealing the theatricality, consumability, and possibilities of self-parody embedded in the image of womanhood.
 
《Hot Honey》thus demonstrates how this practice is being presented in London, one of the central nodes of the international art market and institutional system. It also offers a compelling case through which to consider how a young Korean diasporic artist is making her formal language and critical concerns legible on the global stage.

Anna Park

Anna Park was born in Daegu in 1996 and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for her large-scale works in charcoal and ink, and for pictorial constructions that traverse the boundary between abstraction and figuration.
 
Her practice focuses on themes such as human relationships shaped by the contemporary image environment, desire, the representation of femininity, and the visual norms produced by the media. Lehmann Maupin describes her work as drawing that captures the overheated sensory condition and self-reflexive nature of the contemporary moment.
 
Park studied illustration and animation at Pratt Institute before completing her MFA at the New York Academy of Art. She has held solo exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2022 and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2024 and has continued to expand her international presence since joining Lehmann Maupin in 2025.

Lehmann Maupin London

Lehmann Maupin is an international contemporary art gallery founded in New York in 1996. Long based in New York, the gallery has since expanded its program to Seoul, London, and beyond, introducing contemporary artists across regions and generations to the international stage. The year 2026 also marks the gallery’s 30th anniversary.
 
Its London space is located at No. 9 Cork Street in Mayfair, where, from 2026 onward, it has been operating a more stable year-round program. Lehmann Maupin describes this space as an important node connecting the European art market with an international collector network, given its location in the heart of London’s gallery district and in close proximity to the Royal Academy.
 
 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition Title:《Hot Honey》
Dates: April 30 – May 30, 2026
Venue: Lehmann Maupin London, No. 9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London W1S 3LL, United Kingdom
Website: www.lehmannmaupin.com