Stickymonger

Stickymonger, born Joohee Park in South Korea in 1979, studied Visual Information Design at Ewha Womans University in Seoul before completing an exchange program in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York. She went on to earn an MFA in Digital Arts from Pratt Institute in New York. None of the sources reviewed give exact years for these periods of study.

Her practice centers on large-scale spray-paint murals, cut-vinyl sticker installations, painting, and, more recently, fiberglass sculpture. Galleries that have exhibited her work describe her signature imagery as anime- and manga-influenced female figures with oversized eyes, placed inside dreamlike, surreal environments that hold a tension between innocence and anxiety, femininity and fear. Her first solo exhibition of spray-based work in New York, Searching for Something That Isn't There, was held at AFA Gallery in 2018. Solo shows followed at Allouche Gallery in New York (2021), Villazan Gallery in Madrid (2022), and WOAW Gallery in Hong Kong (2022). She has since exhibited twice at NANZUKA in Tokyo (2023 and 2025 to 2026) and twice at Ross+Kramer Gallery, in New York and Miami, in 2024. She is currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Coverage of Stickymonger in gallery and trade press consistently emphasizes the same throughline: large-format murals and vinyl installations that turn ordinary gallery spaces into eerie, dreamlike, cartoon-inflected environments, built around a tension between childlike imagery and adult anxiety. Writers and gallery texts have described her figures, often young women with exaggeratedly large eyes, as vehicles for exploring femininity, isolation, and the pressures of contemporary urban life. No verbatim, attributable quote from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed in the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Stickymonger's clearest market signal is at the fair and primary-gallery level. At Untitled Art Miami Beach in 2022, a group of paintings from her Last Supper series sold out on preview day at USD 48,000 each, a fair sale rather than an auction result. Her exhibition history also shows an active, ongoing relationship with multiple galleries at once, including Ross+Kramer Gallery, NANZUKA, and WOAW Gallery, rather than a single exclusive representation arrangement, which is typical of an artist still building a secondary market.

At auction, the highest documented result identified is I Don't Write But Paint, which sold for HK$529,200 (approximately USD 67,800) at Phillips. Two further paintings, Insomnia (HK$378,000) and Portrait of Today, Mushrooming (HK$292,100), also sold at Phillips. Exact sale dates for these three lots were not available in the sources reviewed. A separate branded collectible edition, Superplastic x Stickymonger's Formless Magic, realized USD 52,500 in a Christie's online-only contemporary sale; the exact date of that sale is also unconfirmed. Given the small number of results and the missing dates, any conclusions about her secondary market should be treated as provisional.

Stickymonger's market is still primarily a primary one. Her strongest documented price point remains a fair sale rather than an auction result, though at least three paintings have sold at Phillips, with I Don't Write But Paint realizing the highest price identified, HK$529,200 (approximately USD 67,800). None of the available sources give exact sale dates for these lots, and a separate branded collectible piece sold for USD 52,500 at Christie's, so any picture of her secondary market should be treated as preliminary. No museum collection was identified as holding her work in the sources reviewed, and no catalogue raisonne or formal authentication program exists. Collectors should also note that she currently shows with several galleries at once rather than one exclusive representative, which is common at this stage of a career but means provenance and pricing information is more dispersed than it would be for an artist with a single primary gallery.