Boom, 2018
Sumi-ink on paper, 44x30 inches
JOO YEON WOO
Artist Statement
Joo Yeon 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 drawing, painting, photography, and printmaking. In her Traveler’s Cup (2012–ongoing) series, she fuses a paper collage with photography to make a non-traditional still-life photography. She has been collecting her new surroundings and arranging them, per place, in a glass of water that she drinks from every day, in order to absorb that place visually and conceptually. These “portraits” of place embody her desire to come to terms with her origins and to create an artistic archive of displacement, attendant sense of instability, and sense of alienation. Woo photographed selected architecture, landmarks, and monuments, printed the images on three-inch-sized paper, cut out the images very carefully, soaked the cut prints in a glass of water, and re-photographed the print-filled glass within the landscape from whence the image’s subject matter came.
Past Solo Exhibitions: Sound Words, 2018
What's My Name?, 2015
Past Group Exhibitions: Structures of Feeling, 2022 Fractal Nature, 2021 Forever is composed of Nows, 2020 Active directions of the mind, 2019 Facing Disjunction, 2018
Gathering Differences, 2017
In The Secret Garden, 2016
New Art In An Old House, 2016
Transformed Viewpoints, 2015
Liminal Communities, 2014 Frag.ment, 2013 The A.I.R. Gallery 9th Biennial, 2011