GaHee Park

Park was born in 1985 in Seoul, South Korea, and has described leaving Korea in her early twenties before pursuing an undergraduate painting education in Philadelphia. She earned a BFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2012 and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College in New York in 2015; the Dedalus Foundation named her a recipient of its Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Early exhibitions followed in Philadelphia and New York, alongside residencies at The Cooper Union in 2016 and Shandaken: Storm King in 2018.

Her paintings, typically oil on canvas, depict distorted, elongated figures and domestic still-life arrangements, fish, fruit, cocktails, animals, staged with a surreal, symbolically loaded intimacy. Interviews and gallery biographies connect this imagery to her upbringing in Korea and to the experience of cultural displacement after moving to the United States. Her work has been exhibited at Taymour Grahne in London, Perrotin's New York, Seoul, and Paris spaces, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Consortium Museum in Vosne-Romanee, France, and is held in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Pond Society in Shanghai, and the Medianoche Foundation in Granada.

Park now lives and works in Montreal, Canada. In 2025 she held an artist residency at the Opera National de Paris, and 2026 brings both a permanent public art commission, a large-scale glass mosaic for John F. Kennedy Airport's Terminal 6 in New York, and her first major US institutional solo survey at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, running from August 2026 to January 2027 (exhibition title not yet publicly confirmed).

Park's work has been covered by outlets including Whitewall, Metal Magazine, Elephant, and Colossal, alongside gallery and institutional profiles from Ocula and MutualArt. Critical attention has consistently centered on her fusion of surrealist still-life conventions with charged, often erotic domestic scenes, read as an exploration of desire and displacement between her upbringing in Korea and her adult life in North America. No verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed with sufficient sourcing for direct quotation here.

Park's auction record is USD 126,000, achieved by Still Life with Fish at Phillips against a USD 15,000 to 20,000 estimate. Public auction listings do not disclose the exact sale date or sale location for this lot, and no higher result has been identified elsewhere. Public auction data for the artist remain thin, with a limited, undisclosed number of lots to date and a recent twelve-month average sale price in the low thousands, so the record should be read as a sign of strong primary-market demand pressing into a thin secondary market rather than evidence of a deep, established trading pattern.

Park has no catalogue raisonne, unsurprising for a painter still in the early decades of her career, and authentication runs through her primary galleries, Perrotin and Jessica Silverman Gallery. Her auction history remains small, which means her USD 126,000 record should be weighed as a single strong result rather than a stable price floor, and near-term volatility around any individual sale is more likely than for artists with a longer trading record. Her expanding museum footprint, upcoming YBCA survey, and 2026 JFK Terminal 6 public commission are the clearest institutional signals of a market still building toward maturity.