Joo Yeon Woo 우 주연

BiographyJoo Yeon Woo was born in Daegu, South Korea. She received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the Pennsylvania State University and an earlier MFA from Hongik University, Seoul in South Korea. Woo uses her cultural experience of being an immigrant to explore fluidity of identity, sense of place and placeless-ness, boundary, and multicultural diaspora in her art. She works in a multitude of mediums including collage, painting, photography, and printmaking. Woo has exhibited widely, including the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, the Immigrant Artist Biennial in NYC, Tampa Museum of Art in Tampa, the Sejong Museum of Art in Korea, and the Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines. She has been a resident artist at the VCCA in Virginia, Ami Art Museum in Korea, and the Red Gate Residency in Beijing in China. She also received the AHL Contemporary Art Award in NYC and the Korean National Art Festival Award at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea. Woo is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South Florida, and previously taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Artist StatementJoo Yeon Woo uses her cultural experience of being an immigrant to explore the fluidity of identity, sense of place and placeless-ness, boundary, and multicultural diaspora in her art. She works in a multitude of mediums, including drawing, painting, photography, and installation. In her recent project, Gyopo Portraits (2017-ongoing), Woo fuses formal drawing with the embossing technique to render the figures virtually invisible. She creates embossed relief prints on white paper portraying Korean immigrants from communities in which she lives and works—including neighbors near her home, friends in NYC and Denver, and her former students at USF in Tampa. The embossing makes the individual immigrant portrait hard to see and enhances the notions of void and simplicity of white-on-white—the Korean traditional aesthetics established during the Confucian Joseon Dynasty. The work can also be a political commentary on the immigrants’ sociopolitical instability and diasporic identity: being inside versus outside and bold versus vulnerable. Her new project, Do Not Draw a Red Star (2022), is a series of cut-outs from painted sheets that embrace abstract shapes, decorative patterns, and typography. She interweaves Korean indigenous visual patterns with onomatopoetic words, interjections, and protest signs from immigrants, in which she often confronts complex feelings. She is driving cultural differences, turning instances of the linguistic and cultural border into an opportunity to create fresh and sensational narratives.

Website Joo Yeon Woo