SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will present GaHee Park: Behind the Curtain, opening August 7, 2026. Curated by Dorothy Dávila, the exhibition presents recent paintings by Seoul-born, Montreal-based artist GaHee Park (b. 1985) and marks her first solo institutional exhibition in the United States.
Spanning the last five years of Park’s practice, Behind the Curtain brings together paintings that explore sexuality, mortality, fantasy, identity, and alienation through Park’s distinctive surrealist lens. Rendered in subtle hues of gray and pink, Park’s uncanny, often erotic images subvert the viewer’s gaze, shifting the artist’s female subjects into a role of quiet power and evincing a femininity that also reads as feminist. Both visually captivating and subtly unsettling, her work inverts interiority and the external world to construct ambiguous, layered narratives that contemplate identity.
“GaHee Park’s paintings operate in a space between seduction and unease—they draw you in with their beauty and then subtly destabilize your sense of perception,” said Dorothy Dávila, Chief of Curatorial Initiatives at YBCA. “This exhibition is an opportunity for U.S. audiences to encounter Park’s vision in full—a body of work that is both visually arresting and psychologically rich.”
Much of Park’s work transforms intimate spaces into fantastical ones, referencing the realm of the domestic through curtains, tablecloths, and blankets that fuse body and landscape. Saturated with surrealistic detail, the paintings depict women in moments of introspective solitude—gazing at painted fingernails, peering into cocktail glasses—as seaside landscapes and rolling mountains blend into the domestic scenery. Eyes double and look askance to signal another reality in which the subject observes a kind of third space.
In the work Thoughts at Dusk (2024), a yellow sunset positions the subject in a moment of transition where past, present, and future collide to create a new realm unfettered by temporality or reality. Elements like a martini glass and a cat’s water bowl magnify and refract to transform physical and immaterial forms. In Woman with Cocktail, Olives, and Caterpillar (2023–25), a shadow visage with a piercing eye disrupts and interrogates the tranquility of the female protagonist in repose. Rich in art historical references—including seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting—Park’s work meditates on the fleeting nature of pleasure in the face of mortality and the rapid passing of time. With this exhibition, Park lays claim to her own power as both a woman and a painter, signaling that she holds the viewer’s gaze across paintings that complicate the relationship between artist and viewer. GaHee Park: Behind the Curtain will be on view at YBCA through January 3, 2027.
Additionally, the exhibition will be accompanied by a film series, Through an Open Window, co-presented by GaHee Park, Michael Vass, and YBCA, which will include the work of filmmakers Joan Jonas, Maya Deren, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. Showcasing classic, contemporary, and international films that explore related themes of voyeurism, surreality, and the politics of desire, the series will feature 12 screenings taking place each Saturday at 2pm from August 15 – October 31st. Films will include a themed snack and gallery admission, with tickets of $15.
GaHee Park (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA and MFA from Hunter College, New York. Recent exhibitions include Consortium Museum, Vosne-Romanée, France (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (2023); Pond Society, Shanghai, China (2023) and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2021). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and Pond Society, Shanghai, China; Medianoche Foundation, Granada, Spain. She was an 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 2026. She is represented by Perrotin Gallery and Jessica Silverman Gallery. She lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
