At first, GaHee Park’s paintings can seem almost deceptively gentle: pastel rooms, still lifes, smooth bodies, flowers, fish, curtains, and calm faces. But the longer one looks, the more the scene begins to turn against its own softness. A shadow becomes a second presence. A fingernail disturbs the still life. A face seems to look from more than one direction at once.

This sense of delayed recognition runs through her recent work. In Half-Looking, Half-Seen, her presentation at Perrotin New York, Park continues to develop a pictorial world where still life, portraiture, landscape, eroticism, and psychological theatre collapse into one another. These women become watchers, performers, doubles, fragments, and masks, appearing exposed and concealed at the same time, caught between desire and self-possession, intimacy and distance, being seen and seeing back.

Reflecting on this psychological layering and the fracturing of identity, Park explains:

The doubles reflect different inner states of mind, so you could see the lighter figure as the calm one… while the darker is anxious.

– Reflecting on this psychological layering and the fracturing of identity, Park explains.

Park once described her paintings as “a library of different moments,” adding that each work is “an invitation for viewers to make up their own story.” That invitation matters. Her paintings do not behave like closed narratives. They offer clues, but never a single solution. A fingernail slips into the corner of a still life. A shadow begins to look back. A fish lies opened on a lap. A face is split between illumination and darkness. These details feel symbolic, yet they resist settling into fixed meanings, keeping the image alive, restless, and slightly unresolved.

There is a specific kind of quiet tension that underpins this worldview. Park, who grew up within a strict Catholic environment in South Korea before building her life and practice across North America and the international gallery circuit, has long used the canvas as an escape hatch for things that had no other outlet. Painting became a way to express and explore experiences for which she had no other language.

It felt like making a secret underground room that nobody else should know about.

– She recalls this early practice as a necessary act of subversion.

This sense of painting as release and transformation gives much of her work its emotional charge. Yet Park’s paintings are never simply autobiographical. They transform private tensions into carefully constructed worlds where desire emerges through distortion rather than confession. Instead of staging guilt, repression, secrecy, and the hidden life of the body through overt drama, she buries them beneath elegant sea-glass greens and soft peach surfaces. The violence never announces itself. The anxiety remains strangely well-mannered. The eroticism is never only erotic; it is also psychological, symbolic, and at times quietly absurd.

Much of Park’s peculiar power comes from this suspension between Renaissance allegory, Surrealism, Pop-infacted figuration, and personal mythology. The bodies are simplified, almost sculptural. The faces remain cool and restrained. Her palette moves through pale blues, soft peaches, muted yellows, grays, and sea-glass greens. Yet beneath this apparent calm lies a world of unstable relationships that repeatedly returns to transitional states: dusk, dawn, reflection, sleep, and partial vision.

Park has described dusk as a moment when life begins to shift. For her, dusk is not simply atmospheric; it is a psychological condition.

I am very interested in dusk because it is highly related to still life — it is the exact moment of time when hidden life awakens. It is the moment when predators come out to hunt.

– She notes.

For Park, dusk is the point at which the world becomes less certain. Bodies and animals emerge, daily order loosens, and beauty begins to carry the shadow of death.

This interest appears vividly in Wetland at Dusk, where a double-mouthed woman cradles a duck amid tadpoles, dragonflies, a frog, and a disembodied hand. The image has the stillness of a portrait but also the density of an ecosystem. Multiple life cycles unfold within the same pictorial space. Human, animal, aquatic, and vegetal life are not organised into a clear hierarchy. They exist instead in an uneasy, fragile coexistence.

A similar tension runs through Seafood Heaven, where washed-up sea creatures and a human figure occupy the same strange shoreline. The painting holds together seduction and death, beauty and consumption. The sea creatures appear luminous yet lifeless, as though nature has already been transformed into a plate, an offering, or a trophy. Park’s title sharpens the contradiction. “Heaven” becomes less a paradise than a portrait of collective appetite.

In these works, water is never simply a background. It is a zone of transition, dissolving the boundaries between surface and depth, reflection and body, life and afterlife. It allows Park to stage fragile encounters between beings that share the same space without fully belonging to the same world. Her portraits turn inward, exploring the multiplicity of the self through doubling, reflection, and partial concealment.

In Creeping Shadow, a woman’s face is divided by a shadow-like form, while multiple eyes suggest heightened perception or persistent unease. In Half-Seen, Half-Looking, one side of a woman’s face remains calm and illuminated while the other disappears behind a shadowed curtain and a taloned hand. The image feels quiet, but the quietness is deceptive. It becomes a portrait of divided consciousness.

I think of hands, just like mouths and eyes, as a way to intrude something, a way to suspend time for a moment. I would describe it as an ominous feeling.

– Park describes the tactile threat of these recurring intrusions.

To be half-looking and half-seen is to occupy both sides of the gaze. The figure is not simply an object of vision. She is withholding something, watching something, or perhaps refusing to become fully available to the viewer. In this way, Park quietly complicates the historical position of the female figure in painting. Her women may be nude, reclining, fragmented, or watched, but they are rarely surrendered to the viewer. Their expressions remain unreadable. Their interior life belongs entirely to them.

Park has explained that her recurring motifs—shadows, reflections, and multiple eyes—suggest psychological depth and dimensions that exist beyond the figure’s public identity. The additional eye, the second mouth, the shadow figure, or the detached hand never function as decorative surrealism. Each introduces another layer of inner life.

This tension becomes most visible in the still lifes, where apparent innocence gradually begins to feel unstable. Flowers, fruit, bread, fish, and domestic utensils lose their reassuring familiarity in Park’s hands. They become theatrical, erotic, slightly threatening, and quietly humorous. Objects no longer rest on the table. They observe, interrupt, seduce, decay, or interfere with one another.

In Still Life with a Visitor, the domestic arrangement becomes an ambiguous encounter.

I started to imagine myself as a cat or a dog in the corner of the room, just sitting and observing people.

– This position of the detached observer is rooted in Park’s own experience of immigration.

In Still Life with Fruits, Fish, and Finger, the appearance of a disembodied finger transforms the composition into an interruption rather than a simple arrangement. The body enters the still life to probe the things that remain unspoken. These compositions become coded spaces where desire, shame, appetite, humour, and unease surface indirectly. The genre’s long association with abundance, mortality, sensuality, and domestic order turns into a space where suppressed emotions quietly emerge.

This is why Park’s paintings often feel both humorous and unsettling. A fish becomes an erotic substitute. A flower appears unexpectedly flesh-like. A glass begins to resemble an eye. A table quietly turns into a stage for hidden relationships. Park understands that domestic space is never neutral. It is where bodies eat, desire, hide, perform, and remember.

Ambivalence may be the key to Park’s work. Her paintings do not ask us to choose between innocence and danger, comedy and anxiety, tenderness and violence. They allow these conditions to exist simultaneously. A figure may appear calm and melancholic at once. A still life can be beautiful and grotesque within the same image. The body remains erotic, biological, symbolic, and absurd without ever settling into a single identity.

Park’s paintings do not ask us to choose one meaning over another. Instead, they allow contradictory realities to coexist. The shadow is also a subject. The reflection becomes another presence. The animal may be a witness. The body is exposed, yet protected by the very strangeness of its form.

Meaning is never offered all at once. It emerges through delayed perception. A first glance brings elegance, pleasure, perhaps even comfort. A second glance introduces uncertainty. Something no longer fits. A limb feels misplaced. A mouth repeats. A creature looks back. A scene that first appeared serene begins to reveal its instability.

In Incarnation, Park gathers many of her recurring concerns: the female body, exposed interiority, fish, curtains, organic forms, and the distant presence of fire. While the painting recalls Old Master traditions, it never settles into quotation. Instead, Park gently unsettles these inherited structures. The nude, the still life, and the allegorical scene are redirected toward a contemporary psychology shaped by ambiguity, vulnerability, and female subjectivity.

This is where Park’s work becomes quietly radical. She does not reject beauty; she uses it as an invitation. Her surfaces remain seductive, her colours restrained, and her compositions meticulously balanced. Yet beauty never arrives alone. It is accompanied by discomfort, appetite, secrecy, contradiction, and the possibility of transformation.

Her paintings suggest that the self is never singular, the body is never fixed, and desire resists clear definition. Human and non-human presences coexist. Animals, insects, flowers, shadows, and reflections all belong to the same psychological field. The boundaries between subject and object, person and animal, interior and exterior, viewer and viewed remain deliberately porous.

Park paints other ways of existing: softer, stranger, less hierarchical, more vulnerable, and more ambivalent. Her figures never resolve themselves for us. They remain suspended within their own private atmosphere, quietly suggesting that contradiction is not the failure of meaning, but one of its most truthful forms.

What makes GaHee Park’s work so compelling is precisely this refusal to settle. Her paintings are visually inviting yet psychologically elusive. They invite pleasure, only to complicate it, offering beauty that gradually turns strange. They create worlds that feel familiar enough to enter, yet unstable enough to keep us looking. In the end, Park does not explain desire. She allows it to split, double, hide, laugh, and, perhaps most importantly, look back.