GaHee Park

Born in 1985 in Seoul (South Korea), GaHee Park is a contemporary painter whose works explore notions of desire, intimacy, sexuality, the female gaze, and individual freedom. Based in Montreal (Canada), she has developed a unique pictorial practice blending figurative painting, contemporary surrealism, still life, portraiture, domestic scenes, and symbolism. Her visual universe—immediately recognizable by its saturated flat colors, intentionally destabilized perspectives, and compositions populated by figures, animals, flowers, and everyday objects—revisits the codes of art history through a deeply personal approach.

After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia) and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Hunter College in New York in 2015, GaHee Park draws inspiration from Western painting masters, classical still life, and surrealism, while asserting a pictorial style informed by her personal history. Having grown up in a conservative Catholic environment in South Korea, she uses painting as a space for emancipation where she deconstructs traditional representations of the female body, sensuality, and human relationships. Her work is also compared to the aesthetic of Henri Rousseau for its apparent naivety, although her compositions reveal a strong psychological and narrative complexity.

Executed primarily in oil on canvas, her works feature fragmented bodies, mirrors, animals, plants, fruits, meals, and familiar objects that become actors in multiple narratives oscillating between dream, humor, anxiety, and eroticism. Notions of coexistence, metamorphosis, the gaze, memory, identity, and feminism permeate her entire body of work, establishing GaHee Park as a significant figure in the new generation of contemporary figurative painting.

Her work is represented by the Perrotin gallery and has been presented in numerous international institutions and galleries. Her primary solo exhibitions include "Every Day Was Yesterday" at Taymour Grahne Projects (London, 2018), "Betrayal (Sweet Blood)" at Perrotin (New York, 2020), "Too Early After All" at Perrotin Paris (2021), "Not Quite Tomorrow" at Perrotin Paris (2025), and "Half-Looking, Half-Seen" at Perrotin New York (2026). Her works have also been featured in group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2023), the Consortium Museum in Vosne-Romanée (2023), the FLAG Art Foundation in New York (2021), and the Pond Society in Shanghai.

GaHee Park's works are included in several prestigious public collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Miami), the Columbus Museum of Art, the Pond Society (Shanghai), and the Medianoche Foundation (Spain). In 2025, she was named artist-in-residence at the Paris National Opera, where she is developing new projects. In 2026, a major public commission in the form of a monumental glass mosaic was inaugurated in Terminal 6 of John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, confirming her influence on the international art scene. Today, GaHee Park has established herself as one of the leading artists of contemporary painting, through a body of work that renews themes of the body, intimacy, desire, feminism, contemporary surrealism, and narrative figuration.