What’s fiction and what’s reality? Chi Park’s playful portfolio offers no answers

The recent Royal Drawing School graduate wants her audience to “make up their own minds” about what they see in her eclectic pieces.

Date
23 April 2024

Many of Chi Park’s works began life as observational drawing, tucked away in one of her sketchbooks before being brought to life in her studio. It’s this observational element that gives them their familiar sense – a meal with friends, a speedy bike ride, a wander down a busy high street. Though there’s a second layer that gives them a simultaneously uncanny and “ambiguous” feeling, achieved through Chi’s careful blending of imagination and memory, an approach she feels gives her work a “playful perspective on both fiction and reality”. This shines in her piece My Western Friends in an Asian Restaurant, in which Chi blends sketchbook drawings with “imaginative compositions” to “highlighting the awkward humorous juxtaposition of seeing my Western friends in distinctly Asian settings”, she says.

Chi also likes to create contradictions in her style. Lately, she’s been drawn to blending flat graphic shapes with organic hand-drawn lines: “I think the combination of the different visual languages adds intriguing contrast and tension to my work,” says Chi. In her piece A Girl in the City, the clear lines, simplistic shapes and slightly off-kilter composition almost give the impression of a snapshot of an old school video game, before being thrown off by the free-flowing shading, flushed face and textual detail paid to the characters clothing, which gives the piece its analogue core.

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Chi Park: My Western Friends in an Asian Restaurant (Copyright © Chi Park, 2023)

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Chi Park: In the Studio (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Open Studio Poster (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Thursday Night Jam (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Taekwondo Boy (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Whatcha Looking at (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Pious Peter (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: So Young Magazine (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: The Fantasy Queen (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Sketchbook (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: Butterflies (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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Chi Park: A Girl in the City (Copyright © Chi Park, 2024)

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About the Author

Olivia Hingley

Olivia (she/her) is associate editor of the website, working across editorial projects and features as well as Nicer Tuesdays events. She joined the It’s Nice That team in 2021. Feel free to get in touch with any stories, ideas or pitches.

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