Perrotin is pleased to present Not Quite Tomorrow, GaHee Park’s second solo exhibition in Paris and her sixth with the gallery. In this new series, Park unveils paintings that depict seemingly idyllic scenes disrupted by subtle distortions. Drawing from the timeless tradition of still life, she captures sensual and intimate moments, yet her distinctive use of forced perspective unsettles the tranquility, introducing ambivalence and tension. Through this body of work, Park challenges both form and narrative, suspending her subjects in a surreal collapse of time and space.
The strange and ethereal world of GaHee Park’s paintings is populated with doubles of various kinds. Whether as shadow figures or gleaming reflections, an extra set of limbs or lips, a bird or a woman with an extra eye, these are not identical doppelgangers but they are nevertheless uncanny. Often the effect of this doubling is something like that of a reversible image: focusing on one mouth, the figure seems content, focusing on the other mouth, she seems forlorn. Our own gaze is itself doubled by the mechanisms of Park’s skilled doubling. Borrowing a moniker once given to René Magritte, we might dub GaHee Park the Master (Mistress?) of the double take.
We may find in these doubles an echo of the duck-rabbit that fascinated Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For both, the duckrabbit reveals the phenomenon of “seeing-as.”1 Seeing is never simply seeing, it is always seeing-as; interpretation is always already at play. The painter’s gaze is particularly attentive to this fact because, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, the painter’s objects are not altogether real objects: “Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color; like ghosts these objects have only visual existence. The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing.”2 Because it can be seen as this thing or as that, the duck-rabbit illustrates the endless play permitted by the ambiguity of the image. But the figures in Park’s paintings are not like the duck-rabbit, infinitely reversing themselves and revealing the perils of interpretation. Rather, the figures that compel a double take in Park’s works show us not an either/or but a both/and. Both sets of mouths seem to belong to the same face, both sets of eyes fit the bird, the figure and her shadow are equally subjects in the painting. Unlike the reversible image which is fundamentally ambiguous, abiding by the logic of either/or, in Park’s paintings we find instead a productive ambivalence.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Eye and mind
The term “ambivalence” was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1910 and was enthusiastically adopted by Freud, who used it throughout his writings to describe the simultaneous co-existence of two contradictory attitudes. From the Latin ambi (both) and valentia (strength), ambivalence allows for two opposite feelings or ideas to co-exist. The concept of ambivalence recognizes the structural intertwinement of opposites and it seemed to Freud to name perfectly a tendency in psychic life for one idea to reveal, contain, or transform into its opposite. Jacques Lacan illustrated this psychoanalytic insight decades later by inventing the term l’hainamoration, expressing the inseparability of hate and love. Park’s work intuits and interrogates this latter kind of doubling, an ambivalence that presents the two in one and the one as always at least two.
Take, for example, Incarnation which presents a seated woman holding a gutted fish, a manicured finger pulls back the curtain to expose a mons veneris3; opposite these figures, stand an odd chair and a table on which is perched a pink, round, indeterminate object, something like a cyst or an organ; somewhere in the distance, on a screen or through a window, a fire burns. This painting was inspired by Lucas Cranach’s depiction of Lot with his daughters. Believing that the world has been destroyed and that Lot is the last man on earth, Lot’s daughters conspire to become pregnant by intoxicating their father and “lying” with him. This story was alluring to many Old Masters in 16th century painting because of its shocking and seductive narrative. What interests Park however is not only the story’s incestuous and erotic qualities but the curious way in which the daughters instramentalize seduction, how they treat their father as a repository of the future and take as their task the pragmatic extraction of his sperm. They approach their problem as if it were like opening a stubbornly sealed jar; the daughters have to get the contents of what is inside their father’s body out… and then back into their own bodies again.
3. Anatomical term for the upper area of female genitals, Latin for “mountain of Venus.”
Demonstrating a naïve, childlike view of the sexual act and introjecting themselves awkwardly into this version of the primal scene, Lot’s daughters haunt Park’s rendition of this narrative. In this painting Park draws our attention to the ambivalence of inner and outer (the gutted fish, the mons veneris, the bodily organ placed on the table). She evokes an ambivalence in relation to reproduction, showing the human body as sexed body, as biological but also as desiring and therefore ambivalent. The doubles of destruction/ creation, inner/outer, the body as biological/desiring are treated here with an exquisite attunement to ambivalence. Demonstrating her own ambivalence to the legacy of the old masters, Park claims her title as master/mistress.
Park’s paintings invite us to reconsider the operations of the gaze and the construction of meaning, emphasizing the limits of either/or thinking and insisting instead on a more nuanced relation to contradiction and multiplicity. By engaging with art historical legacies while subverting their conventions, Park redefines the role of the contemporary painter—not as a passive inheritor, but as an active interrogator of tradition. Through her careful negotiation of both form and narrative, she demonstrates that mastery lies not in resolution, but in the ability to contend with desire in all its messiness, contradiction, and ambivalence.
Text by Amanda Holmes, MA, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Applied arts Vienna, Austria
Born in 1985 in Seoul, South Korea
Lives and works in Montreal, Canada
Park’s paintings may be realized in the “naive” style that recalls painters like Henri Rousseau, but her subject matter is far from it. Often depicting romantic scenes where the idyll has turned sour, the sexual acts that seem to be transpiring in her paintings are at odds with their quaint settings, where art history’s favorite still life subjects—rotund fruit, cheeses, and bottles, appear on the verge of rolling off the surface of the table: so pitched is the surface, so hyper-stylized is her take on forced perspective. And yet, space doesn’t seem to recede in Park’s paintings. It’s cancelled out by the kind of flatness only a laboring love of texture and pattern can produce. Space comes to a halt as Park revels in woodgrain and brocade. Any indication of space comes courtesy of some framed element that seems to replicate the scene, albeit with some slight modification like a game of “Spot the Difference.” A window? A mirror? Another painting? Park revels in these ambiguities as well.
More about the artist
