By Tyler Stallings
Wendy Park’s Of Our Own, currently on view at Various Small Fires in Tustin, translates personal and collective memory into a visual language that is both formal and affectionate, conceptual and accessible. In this suite of seven acrylic paintings, Park resurrects the atmospheres of Korean-American swap meets, household rituals, and urban commercial sites through an idiosyncratic style where objects float, scale shifts freely, and the flat picture plane is treated as a stage for cultural symbols to declare their presence.
Technique here is inseparable from meaning. Park’s painting is precise yet emotionally loose, drawing on the visual codes of Pop Art—bold color, crisp outlines, frontal composition—but filtering them through a decorative sensibility that recalls Matisse: the disregard for naturalistic space, the embrace of ornament as meaning, and the sense that everything in the image was chosen for how it both pleases and reveals. Her palette leans into synthetic brightness—pinks, mint greens, golden ochres—but the emotional register is grounded in memory and care. There is no ironic remove. Instead, her use of stylization feels devotional, a form of visual preservation.
In 90’s Compton Swap Meet, a diptych that anchors the show, Park reconstructs an exterior view of a now-vanished commercial space with uncanny stillness. A bird hanging on a perch, a wooden cross hovering above asphalt, and a pair of diamond earrings, become symbols not only of work and resourcefulness but of quiet beauty. The floating composition allows some elements—like an oversized Choco Pie wrapper or a strawberry ice cream cup —to loom large, while others, such as traffic cones or a bicycle, shrink away. This shifting scale mimics how memory works: retaining detail with intensity, not proportion.
In works like Health Care, jars of Tiger Balm drift like votive offerings over the barely visible text “HEALTH CARE,” blurring the line between object and message. Charms Cash similarly isolates a tin of sour candies alongside rubber-banded wads of bills, referring to informal saving practices among immigrant communities. Park’s flattening of the image plane—there is no shadow, no illusion of volume—forces the viewer into an encounter with the objects as icons. They don’t occupy space; they assert meaning.
Park’s style—derived from years in animation as well as a personal archive of Korean and American visual motifs—avoids sentimentality by remaining visually direct. The decorative, in her hands, becomes a form of realism: a realism of attention, where pattern and color evoke texture, repetition, and daily life. While the paintings clearly emerge from a Korean-American context, they operate on multiple levels—as documentary, as homage, and as aesthetic distillation.
That this exhibition appears at Various Small Fires’ new Tustin location is notable. With its established presence in Los Angeles and branches in Seoul and Texas, VSF brings a globally engaged, critically minded program to Orange County, which remains largely underserved in terms of contemporary commercial galleries. Of Our Own is a timely and resonant inaugural gesture—grounded in place, generous in form, and attuned to the quiet details that carry history.
June 21-August 16, 2025
119 N Prospect Ave,
Tustin, CA 92780
Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Southern California. With over 30 years of experience, he has contributed to and edited numerous books and catalogs, offering insightful scholarship in contemporary art. To learn more about his work, visit www.tylerstallings.com.
