Jessica Silverman unveils GaHee Park's major solo exhibition, 'Soft Shell'
GaHee Park, Dream of a Bird, 2026, Oil on linen, 45 x 60 x 1 1/2 inches / 114.3 x 152.4 x 3.8 cm.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA.—
Jessica Silverman announced GaHee Park’s first solo show in the gallery’s large space, running October 28–December 19, 2026. Raised in Seoul, South Korea, Park completed degrees in Philadelphia and New York before moving to her current home base in Montreal, Canada. Her neo-surrealist paintings complicate the boundaries between interior and exterior, fantasy and reality, viewer and viewed. Featuring 13 new oil paintings, the exhibition showcases her signature figures and still lifes that often mutate into landscapes.
The exhibition takes its title, “Soft Shell,” from what Park describes as “the containers of life that we inhabit to feel safe, but which do not protect us completely.” Throughout the show, protection takes many physical forms, such as conches, fruit skins, fingernails, and fish scales. Curtains and clothing conceal and reveal, while martini glasses and aquariums evoke life in a fishbowl. All objects are at once aloof and exposed—a condition embodied by the enigmatic women who populate Park’s chimerical worlds. These soft structures offer shelter while simultaneously exposing the vulnerability of the bodies and identities they contain.
The show’s largest work, Eating Angel (2026) is rife with dark humor. A monumental nude woman looms above a cat beside a wing licked clean, a small white shirt, and a cast-off halo. It appears the cat has devoured the angel of the title, along with its innocence. The figure holds a white drape as though to shield this scene from view; however, a toe on the left and a gloved hand on the right implies the presence of voyeurs who’ve become unwitting witnesses to this divine crime.
Park loves to play with the Western tradition of the female nude, which Surrealists revisited in the early twentieth century. In these works, women were intended to entertain the European male gaze. Park changes the rules of this old colonial game. Her bare breasted figures are neither demure nor passive but hyper aware. Refusing to be conquered, these heroines are sly exhibitionists who draw the viewer into a “ping pong” of gazes.
Park also displays a macabre sense of humor in Dream of a Bird (2026). Here, a drawn-back curtain sets the stage, revealing a dead goose on a platter with fruit. The bird’s head rests directly on the pages of an open book which depicts a bifurcated cloudscape. Has the creature snapped its neck by flying into an image of the sky? Like many people in America today, did it confuse representation with reality?
In Bouquet with a Visitor (2026), an abundant floral arrangement overflows with spread leaves and erect anthurium spadices. Set against a grey backdrop, the vase is surrounded by unexpected intrusions: a finger creeps out from beneath a curtain, conjoined fish gasp for air, a halved pear balances on its end, and a reflective silver platter of fruit partially conceals an open eye. What might initially seem like a conventional still life becomes a stage populated by watchful, elusive presences.
Paintings such as Faces with Frog and Tadpoles and Woman and Moth in Eclipse (both 2026) feel vintage yet contemporary. They suggest dusk or dawn in indefinite locations that could be inside or outside, natural or artificial, airy or airless. Like those of René Magritte and Gertrude Abercrombie, Park’s settings are eerily quiet, theatrical spaces that follow the logic of dreams, in which appearances give way to psychological truths.
Park is a mistress of ambiguity. In the still life, Fish Bowl with Fruits (2026), a single open eye peers through a peephole—or is, perhaps, reflected in a mirror. At the center of the composition, phallic fish and celestial orbs are reflected and refracted within a kaleidoscopic glass bowl. Brimming with color and pattern, Park’s use of geometric fragmentation and flat surface recalls the work of Georges Braque and Sonia Delaunay.
Influenced by feminist artists like Lisa Yuskavage and Nicole Eisenman, Park casts curious light on the relationship between body and mind. Her strange, seductive paintings embrace the contradictions embedded in the art history of female sexuality rather than resolving them. Looking is never a passive act – the line between protection and exposure, fantasy and reality, and self and other remains soft and blurry.
GaHee Park (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) has a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA and MFA from Hunter College, New York. Park has enjoyed a solo exhibition at Académie Conti, Vosne-Romanée, France, and her work has been included in group shows at Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of notable institutions, including Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and Pond Society, Shanghai, China. She was an AROP Artist-in-Residence at the Opéra national de Paris in 2025 and her large-scale glass mosaic commission for the John F. Kennedy Airport’s Terminal 6 will debut in October 2026. Park’s first institutional solo in the United States is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, through January 3, 2027, and her first solo show with Jessica Silverman will open October 28. She lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
