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.
In Korean Daily, Park reimagines a Koreatown streetscape; a cobalt-blue laundry cart anchors the sidewalk, while adjacent newspaper dispensers labeled Daily News and 한국일보 (Korea Daily) invoke the analog era of Korean-language journalism. These urban fixtures recall the 1969 arrival of The Korea Times in Los Angeles, a pivotal institution for cultural continuity and transnational connection long before the advent of digital media. Blurring the line between documentation and invention, Korean Daily pays homage to the ways emerging communities inscribe themselves into the city’s commercial topography and cultural fabric.
In Kae Don, bundles of U.S. currency rest atop an abalone-inlaid table adorned with a tiger and dragon, astrological figures drawn from Korean mythological and decorative traditions. The work references kae don, an informal savings practice rooted in Korean-American communities, in which members collectively pool money—often as a means of accessing capital when credit was limited or denied. Park connects these ancestral symbols to systems of mutual aid and financial ingenuity. The resulting composition reflects on aspiration, displacement, and the adaptive strategies through which diasporic communities forge autonomy across generations.
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Wendy Park (b. 1986, Los Angeles, California, lives and works in Los Angeles, California) is a Korean-American painter. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design. She shares her Korean-American stories and socio-economic nuances that remind her of her childhood while capturing her family’s pursuit and manifestation of the American Dream. She hopes her depictions of personal Asian-American nostalgia will build up curiosities of the commerce and culture of the marginalized. She has held solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles and Seoul; Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles, and Bill Brady Gallery, Miami. Park has also participated in group exhibitions and fairs at PM/AM, London; Sow and Tailor, Los Angeles; The Pit, Los Angeles; Harper’s, Paris; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; Half Gallery, Los Angeles; Frieze, Los Angeles and Seoul; X Museum, Beijing; KIAF, Seoul, and Art Basel, Hong Kong.
