At Lehmann Maupin in Chelsea, Anna Park transforms casinos, carnival games, childhood play, and Americana into a turbulent charcoal world where winning and losing become metaphors for contemporary life.

The rules are familiar: play the game, take the risk, win the prize.

But what happens when the logic of the game begins to define everyday life?

In House Rules, on view at Lehmann Maupin’s New York gallery at 501 West 24th Street, artist Anna Park turns that question into a sprawling new body of charcoal-based work. Running September 10 through October 10, 2026, the exhibition draws on the visual language of board games, arcades, carnival attractions, casinos, and Las Vegas to examine competition, desire, risk, and the pressure to come out ahead.

Park’s characters inhabit a world that looks playful at first glance.

But beneath the games is something more complicated: a culture in which achievement can increasingly appear binary—win or lose, succeed or fail, get ahead or fall behind.

A World Built Around Winning

Park was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1996 and now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her practice moves between figuration and abstraction, using charcoal to create scenes that feel simultaneously recognizable and unstable. She begins her canvases through an improvisational process of mark-making, allowing bodies, faces, gestures, and fragments of environments to emerge through energetic lines.

That process is particularly suited to House Rules.

Games depend on structure. There are rules, objectives, prizes, penalties, winners, and losers.

Park’s compositions often seem to contain those same competing forces. Figures collide, gestures overlap, and fragments of recognizable imagery appear to move at different speeds.

The result is not a straightforward narrative.

It is closer to a psychological landscape.

From Childhood Games to Las Vegas

The exhibition begins with familiar forms of entertainment.

Board games and video games are among the earliest systems through which many people encounter competition. Carnival games introduce the promise of winning something tangible. Arcades add points, rankings, and repetition. Casinos take the logic further, transforming chance itself into entertainment.

Park connects these experiences to the larger cultural mythology of Las Vegas.

The promise of “winning big” becomes a metaphor for an American culture in which success can be understood through accumulation, achievement, visibility, and individual advancement. Lehmann Maupin describes House Rules as an examination of how deeply this win-or-lose mentality has become embedded in the American imagination and what it reveals about the evolving promise of the American Dream.

The casino, then, becomes more than a setting.

It becomes a metaphor.

The Game of Desire

Park’s imagery also introduces another important element: desire.

Female figures appear throughout the new works as alluring and distracting presences. According to the gallery, their role recalls the way advertising and popular media can shape desire while simultaneously exposing and exploiting insecurities.

This is consistent with Park’s broader interest in the construction of gender and the ways popular imagery influences how people see themselves and others.

Her figures are rarely passive illustrations of an idea.

They participate in the spectacle.

They attract the viewer, interrupt the composition, and become part of the larger machinery of wanting.

That tension gives House Rules another layer: the game is not simply about winning.

It is about being persuaded to play.

Charcoal as Motion

Park’s choice of charcoal is central to the atmosphere of the exhibition.

Her black-and-white works combine the vigorous energy of graphic novels with fragmentation associated with Cubism. Faces can appear only partially, bodies seem to dissolve into surrounding marks, and gestures can stretch into streaks of movement.

This creates an unusual contradiction.

Charcoal is historically associated with drawing, observation, and directness. Park uses it to produce scenes that often feel unstable and almost cinematic.

A hand may emerge from a dense field of marks.

A face may appear and disappear.

A figure can seem simultaneously present and fragmented.

The technique mirrors the psychological uncertainty at the heart of House Rules.

The world is recognizable—but never completely settled.

House Rules and the American Dream

The exhibition’s title suggests that there is an established system governing the game.

But whose rules?

Park’s new works consider how childhood experiences of winning and losing can mirror larger cultural narratives surrounding individualism and achievement.

The American Dream traditionally promises that determination and effort can lead to upward mobility.

Park approaches that idea indirectly.

Instead of illustrating the dream, she examines the cultural machinery surrounding it: competition, aspiration, advertising, entertainment, consumption, and the promise of reward.

The casino becomes an especially effective image because it compresses all of these ideas into one environment.

You enter.

You choose.

You risk something.

You hope for a reward.

And eventually, someone—or something—wins.

Familiar Americana, Reassembled

Park’s work is populated by recognizable fragments of American visual culture, but she rarely allows those references to remain stable.

Her imagery draws on recurrent archetypes and Americana, while her compositions collapse different moments and cultural references into swirling tableaus. The gallery describes her practice as addressing inner conflict, shame, longing, growth, and mortality through this combination of visual allegory and fragmented imagery.

In House Rules, the familiar becomes strange.

The carnival is no longer simply fun.

The arcade is no longer simply nostalgic.

The casino is no longer simply glamorous.

Each becomes a system through which Park examines contemporary expectations.

The pleasure remains—but so does the pressure.

A New Chapter for Park

House Rules follows a busy period in Park’s development.

Earlier in 2026, Lehmann Maupin presented her solo exhibition Hot Honey in London, her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. That exhibition continued her interest in popular media and gender while introducing shaped supports and restrained passages of color into her charcoal compositions.

House Rules brings that developing language back to New York.

The works on view include Happy Hour, Lucky You, Try Me, Doctor’s Orders, Just a Feeling, Take Two, Step Right Up, and House Rules, all dated 2026.

The title work itself is a substantial charcoal, ink, and paint work on paper mounted on wood panel, measuring approximately 60 by 63 inches.

Together, the works create an environment in which scale, movement, humor, and discomfort continually overlap.

The Stakes of Play

What makes House Rules particularly relevant to New York is the way Park collapses distinctions between entertainment and everyday pressure.

The city itself is saturated with games of advancement.

Careers.

Visibility.

Consumption.

Social status.

Real estate.

Technology.

Advertising.

The exhibition does not claim that all of these systems are identical to gambling. Instead, it uses gambling and play as visual metaphors for a broader cultural tendency to measure outcomes through competition and reward.

That is where Park’s work becomes more than an examination of Las Vegas imagery.

The casino is everywhere once you begin to recognize its logic.

When the Rules Become the Subject

Anna Park’s charcoal worlds rarely offer a clean exit.

Her figures do not stand outside the system observing it from a safe distance. They are caught inside it—looking, performing, desiring, competing, and sometimes simply trying to understand what is happening around them.

That tension is central to House Rules.

The exhibition begins with games that seem innocent: childhood competitions, arcade screens, carnival prizes.

It ends somewhere much larger.

With questions about ambition.

About desire.

About the pressure to succeed.

And about what happens when a society becomes increasingly accustomed to thinking in terms of winners and losers.

At Lehmann Maupin, Anna Park turns the gallery into a game room without offering visitors a simple scorecard.

Instead, she leaves the viewer inside the game.

And asks us to look closely at the rules.

Anna Park: House Rules is on view at Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, New York, from September 10 through October 10, 2026. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; admission is free.