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

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.