Victoria Miro Projects – Haejin Park: Imaginer
Victoria Miro Projects is delighted to present Imaginer by Connecticut-based artist Haejin Park. This is the thirteenth project in an ongoing series of presentations by invited international artists. The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by Lucy Mercer.
‘In this exhibition, I used water most vigorously, feeling the paint boiling in my hands. Spilling, pouring, grabbing water and throwing colours across canvas and paper, I see the paint happening.’ – Haejin Park
Haejin Park has created a new body of work in which histories, fantasies and memories coalesce. Park’s paintings are made in watercolour, a medium often associated with studies and sketches. Central to her practice, watercolour’s inherent qualities of immediacy, rawness and fluidity allow her to feel ‘the most empowered and limitless’.
Water activates colour. Inseparable from the medium, colour drips, spreads and blossoms across Park’s paintings. ‘Colours determine my composition,’ she says. ‘Colours tell me what to do next. Where to draw, where to paint.’ As water disperses the pigment, painting becomes an ongoing process of negotiation between intention and chance where she ‘surrenders to an image to make an image’.
In Imaginer, Park returns to abstract figuration. Forms represent the artist and her family members, and motifs of eyes, circles and flowers recur throughout the paintings. A woman kneels against a green-blue moon; wings emerge from the backs and eyes of figures, while other forms become self-contained worlds populated by landscapes, characters and symbols. As the exhibition title suggests, Park uses these motifs to unlock and enter both imagined worlds and her own inner visions.
‘Park is not an abstract expressionist, though her works like Pollock’s drip paintings engage with fluid materials and process,’ writes Mercer. ‘She is also not a figurative artist – something in-between.’
Park has written and recorded poems to accompany selected artworks, which can be read and listened to while navigating the exhibition.
About the artist
Haejin Park lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Park completed her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, and her MFA at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2026, her work was included in group presentations at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Tina Kim Gallery, New York; and Harper’s Gallery, New York. Other recent group presentations include Gladwell Projects, Miami (2025); Loft Projects, New York (2025); and Yale University, Connecticut (2025).
Park received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award in 2026. She was selected for the Mahler & Lewitt Studios residency in Spoleto, Italy (2025) and the NXTHVN Fellowship in New Haven, USA (2025–2026).
Image: Haejin Park, When Circles Turn Into Daisies, 2026
Ink and pastel on canvas
121.9 x 152.4 cm
48 x 60 in
© Haejin Park
Courtesy the artist