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Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Korean American artist reflects on her parents' immigrant experience in Tustin gallery exhibit
When Korean American artist Wendy Park was growing up in Southern California in the 1980s and '90s, the Compton Fashion Center swap meet was her playground. 'I grew up with immigrant parents from Korea and we worked in the swap meets all over L.A. We did Norwalk, Palmdale, Paramount and Compton was a place that I remember vividly,' said Park. 'I remember it being such a beautiful, colorful place.' Park's early life at the swap meet and her parents' immigrant experience are at the center of her third solo exhibition at Various Small Fires OC gallery in Tustin. Titled 'Of Our Own,' Park's paintings explore artifacts and rituals of daily life as an immigrant and the objects that can connect a current home to one left behind. In the exhibition, the large doubled paneled work, ''90s Compton Swap Meet' captures an uncharacteristically quiet moment at the swap meet, void of both customers and vendors. A carousel of sunglasses for sale with hand mirrors tied to the display sits along side a jungle of plants, some hanging and others potted in plastic pink swans. A broom, trash bag and metal hand truck lean against the brick wall, evidence of the work being done, next to a stall that sells baby strollers and battery-operated toy puppies that bark and flip. 'My mom was telling me how this really was a place of community,' said Park. 'It used to be a Sears building and a Korean man bought it and made all these little stalls and inside there were more kiosks and stalls. It was a place where Korean immigrants who don't have access to starting a business could come and work.' Swap meets themselves tend to be place of community for immigrant populations. They are places where they hear their own language spoken and purchase products and ingredients specific to their needs. 'This is painted from a woman's perspective of that era,' Park said of the work. 'It was a place of opportunity for Korean immigrants.' The subject matter is an incredibly timely one, given the countless raids made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement across the nation in recent weeks with immigrant marketplaces and hubs like Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet, MacArthur Park and downtown Santa Ana targeted locally. 'Immigrants are the most hardworking people. They leave their families, they leave everything they know to come and start a new life. It is tragic that they finally get here, overcome their struggles and maybe live a good life and then get taken away,' Park said about the current climate. 'It is heartbreaking to see. It is an unfair situation and done poorly.' Park received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design and spent 13 years in Disney animation. The bright colors that inform her work draw on that experience while also reflecting her point of view as a child, how colorful and alive the world seemed to her then. She references both American pop and Korean folk art in her work and makes newspaper kiosks, coin laundry carts and pots of Tiger Balm worthy of investigation. In 'Charms Cash' wads of dollar bills are tightly rubber-banded and stored in a can used to hold hard candy. 'It's really difficult for immigrants to trust the banking systems,' said Park. 'They are afraid of how much information they have to give or what might happen. My parents would hide money in the house or store it at the swap meet in candy containers like this.' Park's father sold plants at the swap meet and she got in the habit of hiding things in the plastic swan pots popular in the era, which are present in 'Go Swan' alongside an open can of beer and lit cigarette over a Korean board game. Some pieces are also historic documentation of sites that might otherwise be lost to fleeting memory. 'Western and 5th' depicts Korean market signage that no longer exists, but Park recalled visiting the center as child with her grandmother and aunts. The memory was unearthed with the help of an old photo of the 1992 L.A. riots. The concept for the '90's Compton Swap Meet' piece is an idea Park said she has carried in her mind for a while and its completion was made possible partly by oral history shared by her mother. When the two of them couldn't agree on the coloring of the building facade of the Compton swap meet, Park used a hip hop music video for reference. 'My mom members it as a brick-colored storefront but I was telling her I remember it like a rainbow,' said Park. 'I was watching a Tupac music video and it showed it with these colors in it.' Her memories helped Park piece together a more accurate representation of the place she and her family spent long days. Hours at the swap meet were so demanding in fact, that the family often couldn't get to church on Sundays. 'There was actually a room inside the Compton swap meet where they would all have fellowship and pray and have Bible study on Sunday,' said Park. The religious community found at the Compton Fashion Center is depicted in the wooden crucifix featured in the work. While Park remembers the swap meet fondly, she admits her mother has expressed a desire for her talented daughter to choose a more pleasing subject to paint. 'She is like, 'you can paint anything in the world, why are you painting the swap meet?'' said Park. But while her mother sees the family's tenure at the swap meet as a time she would just as soon forget, Park said the memories give her a sense of pride and reminds her how hard her parents worked to create a better life. 'For me, it is so admirable,' said Park. Mostly, Park hopes her art will encourage people to keep an open mind about others who might be living with fear for themselves or their loved ones as ICE raids continue. Park said now is the time immigrant families like need their community more than ever. 'The biggest thing is empathy; have an open heart and protect those who need it right now,' said Park. 'A lot of people are afraid to go out and get groceries, or do simple things.' Wendy Park's solo exhibition 'Of Our Own' is on view through July 19 at VSF OC, 119 N. Prospect Ave., Tustin. The gallery is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Boston Globe
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Less red tape, more trains: SCOTUS boosts the ‘abundance' agenda
Whether that's a good or bad thing divides progressives. Advertisement Some environmentalists decried the ruling. 'This disastrous decision to undermine our nation's bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,' Wendy Park, an attorney for one of the environmental groups that challenged the railway, told Reuters. But the more interesting story here was the dogs that didn't bark — the liberals that a decade ago probably would have lambasted the ruling, but were notably silent. It's also interesting that the court's three liberals joined the 8-0 ruling (one justice recused himself). Advertisement Broadly speaking, the abundance theory is that Democrats need to show they can do stuff and build things if they are going to win the trust of voters. For too long, progressives have said they believe in the power of government to help people — to build housing, transit lines, clean energy, etc. — but then hobbled the ability of either the government or the private sector to actually do any of those things. Now voters just don't believe their promises — and they're right to be leery, since progressive rules too often turn progressives priorities like the California High Speed rail project into quagmires. Indeed, parts of Kavanaugh's ruling sound eerily like the words of a Democratic policy wonk. Because of overly onerous reviews, he wrote, 'fewer projects make it to the starting line. Those that survive often end up costing much more than is anticipated or necessary… And that also means fewer jobs, as new projects become difficult to finance and build in a timely fashion.' The original 1970 environmental-review law was never intended to work this way, he said. 'A 1970 legislative acorn has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development 'under the guise' of just a little more process,' he wrote. 'The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it,' he wrote. A rail overpass being built in Hanford, Calif., that may or may not carry high speed trains at some point. IAN C. BATES/NYT The gist of the ruling is that projects can't be expected to analyze every imaginable environmental impact. It's one thing for backers to study the immediate, predictable environmental impact of a construction project on wildlife, for instance. But environmental groups also wanted the Utah review to include an analysis of the extra greenhouse gas emissions the project could lead to if it led to more global oil production and use that pushed up emissions, something that was outside the control of either the railroad or its regulators. Advertisement It's easy to see how that thinking can lead to absurd outcomes. The further from the actual project, the more an analysis of environmental 'impact' is built on speculation and conjecture. At an extreme, it's like asking the butterfly to study its environmental impact on the hurricane. There has to be some limiting principle on the scope of reviews to avoid the kind of paralysis that Kavanaugh warned about — and that California's rail project in fact experienced. You probably won't find a Democrat willing to say it, but Kavanaugh and the court did them a big favor. They can spend less time fighting among themselves now that the decision has been made for them to narrow the scope of environmental review. And the next time progressives run on promises to build transit lines or green energy, the ruling makes it a little bit more likely they'll actually be able to deliver. This is an excerpt from , a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to . Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Utah's oil train gets U.S. Supreme Court blessing
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a controversial Utah oil railway expansion that was initially denied in 2023 by the District of Columbia's U.S. Court of Appeals. The decision was a unanimous 8-0, with Justice Neil Gorsuch recusing himself. In 2021, the federal Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that regulates rail transportation, approved the northeastern Utah expansion brought by seven Utah counties that would span along the Colorado River to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Environmentalists argued that the agency had not adequately considered the environmental impact that the 88-mile railway would create, and that it would have broad implications for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews. Following the Supreme Court's ruling, Wendy Park, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity said it was a 'disastrous decision' and to 'undermine our nation's bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify and people will be less healthy,' per The New York Times. However, the federal agency conducted a more than 3,600-page environmental impact assessment to address any potential environmental effects. In the Supreme Court ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the D.C. court's denial of construction was leveraging environmental impact statements mandated by a federal law from 1970 to ultimately control federal agencies. 'NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it,' the opinion said, noting that the railway would grow the economy and create jobs on a national scale in the 'isolated Utah basin.' When reviewing the D.C. Circuit's decision, Kavanaugh added that it did not allow the Transportation Board 'substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases' and 'ordered the Board to address the environmental effects of projects separate in time or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line. But NEPA requires agencies to focus on the environmental effects of the project at issue.' 'Citizens may not enlist the federal courts, 'under the guise of judicial review' of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand,' the opinion concluded, ultimately rejecting the lower court's ruling." In response to the Supreme Court's decision, Utah lawmakers welcomed the decision, including Sen. John Curtis, whose platform generally spans environmental issues. 'The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling poses a firm and a clear message: NEPA is a 'procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock.' For too long, litigious groups have weaponized environmental reviews to stall critical projects—oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, and more," Curtis posted on social media. 'If we're serious about unleashing American energy, we need to give the sector what it needs most: predictable rules and freedom from arbitrary delays.' Utah Gov. Spencer Cox responded to Curtis' post that shared a news story by The Associated Press, finding humor in its headline. 'The Court didn't 'scale back' a key environmental law, the court unanimously stopped an insane idea that doesn't exist anywhere in the law,' he wrote. 'Extreme leftist groups have been destroying our ability to do anything in this country and weaponizing what was once simple and straight-forward. The court just read and applied the actual law here.' Rep. Mike Kennedy, who serves Utah's 3rd Congressional District, said the Supreme Court ruling was a 'significant advancement' to the country's energy production and a boost to rural economies. 'Prior to this ruling, NEPA was used by agencies and interest groups to delay or block projects, hindering growth in rural communities. By affirming the project's approval, the Court has empowered local and state governments to pursue development opportunities that directly benefit Utah residents,' he said on X. Utah Sen. Mike Lee shared similar sentiments, touting the ruling as a 'victory for Utah and American energy dominance!'
