As federal immigration raids sweep across Southern California, Wendy Park’s new solo exhibition in Tustin is painfully timely for the Korean American artist.

Park’s show, “Of Our Own,” now on view at the Various Small Fires gallery in Tustin, explores the textures of Korean American immigrant life through colorful but quiet still-life paintings pulling images from her own childhood. But Park says the works are more than nostalgic. They’re pointed meditations on survival at a time when immigrant communities once again find themselves under siege.

“I was finishing the show while the raids were happening,” Park said in an interview. “It just kind of doubled down on the reason I chose to share these stories.”

Her parents, immigrants from South Korea, raised Park in Cerritos after first arriving in Koreatown. Like many Korean American children of the 1980s and ‘90s, Park spent weekends at swap meets, served as an interpreter before she could even spell the word and carried the burden of bicultural navigation early on.

Her memories — of flea market stalls, junk drawers and family hustle — form the scaffolding of the exhibit and current events its backdrop. The recent raids, which have targeted immigrant-heavy workplaces including swap meets, small garment shops and restaurants, have sent fear rippling through communities.

For many Koreans, Park said, watching Latino workers — now essential to their businesses — being detained is retraumatizing. The chaos and turmoil familiar to a community still haunted by the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, which significantly impacted Koreatown.

“This fear is familiar,” she said. “It’s not just economic. It’s deeply emotional. I think about what it felt like for our parents, to have left everything behind, to get here and build something, and then to watch it collapse in an instant.”

In “Korean Daily,” one of the show’s standout works, Park renders a Koreatown sidewalk where a cobalt-blue laundry cart sits beside a newsstand displaying The Korea Daily in Hangul, the Korean alphabet. The objects may be mundane, but for Park, they’re loaded.

“They’re monuments,” she said. “Little monuments to how we survived here.”

That survival, she said, depended — and still depends — on community. Swap meets weren’t just businesses; they were ecosystems. Places where Korean vendors sold to Mexican and Central American families. Places where immigrants didn’t need to speak fluent English to find what they needed.

Park’s own father ran the Compton Fashion Center swap meet, a once-bustling Korean-owned market housed in a former Sears building. In “Go Swan,” she paints plastic planters shaped like swans — the kind her dad used — alongside a beer can and a lit cigarette, a nod to long workdays and quick breaks.

Her mother, Park said, still wonders why her daughter would bother painting these “ugly” things.

Because they’re simply “a part of our story,” Park said.

As ICE raids show no sign of stopping, immigrant communities in neighborhoods such as Koreatown — a densely packed district of Los Angeles where Korean and Latino residents live, work and rely on each other — are experiencing what some local leaders have called a “second Sa-i-gu,” a Korean American reference to the 1992 unrest. That year, Korean-owned stores were looted and burned and some Koreans famously took to their rooftops with firearms to defend their shops, birthing the “Rooftop Koreans” meme now revived by some right-wing figures online, including Donald Trump Jr.

Park bristles at the memeification of that trauma.

“The protests now are completely different. Comparing them to the LA riots is just laughable,” she said. “And disrespectful.”

Through her art, Park said she wants people to understand that many of the same anxieties, about being unprotected, unheard and unseen, persist today.

“The biggest thing is empathy,” Park added. “I hope people see a little bit of themselves through my family’s story.”