Wendy Park

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 21, 2025 4–6PM Various Small Fires (VSF) is proud to present Of Our Own, Wendy Park’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and the first at VSF OC. Featuring seven new paintings, the exhibition reflects on the social infrastructure and commercial landscapes that shaped Park’s formative years as a first-generation Korean-American growing up in Southern California. Drawing from memory and a visual archive of family photographs, Park’s compositions conjure the storefronts, and shared urban spaces of Los Angeles that have since evolved—not merely as sites of economic activity, but as vital centers of kinship, resilience, and cultural persistence. Park shares the obstacles Korean immigrants faced in building lives in Los Angeles–stories that are not only personal, but profoundly collective. Each painting offers a fragment of a larger, intergenerational narrative deeply felt across the Korean-American community. Rendered in bold, flattened perspectives and crisp contours, Park’s visual language is shaped by her background in animation, while nodding to the traditions of American Pop and Korean folk art. Everyday objects—coin laundry carts, bound stacks of dollar bills, newspaper kiosks, convenience store signage—are recast as quiet monuments of diasporic life. Mundane yet deeply symbolic, these forms operate as vessels of memory, cultural inheritance, and resistance, forming a textured portrait of the immigrant experience. This body of work was produced during a period of heightened ICE activity in Southern California, a backdrop that sharpened Park’s meditations on visibility, vulnerability, and the misrepresentation of immigrant communities in American public discourse. Her paintings serve counter-narratives: tributes to the immigrant labor, love, and informal economies that have shaped the American landscape.