Delicate touches of the artist are ingrained in Yoo, Ju-hee’s studio. The workbench standing on the floor and countless canvases on it lead us to the world of monochrome painting. Walking around a partition, you can see the early and recent works of the artist categorized by series. On the workbench are numerous rubber squeegees in different size and thickness, which replace
brushes. As you can imagine, Yoo, Ju-hee’s studio fully reveals the road she has walked on, the source of her creativity, the reason she relinquished colors, her intention in pursuing the form of series, and her pictorial strategy for the Dansaekhwa. Let us dissect the pictorial theories in Dansaekhwa by looking at her squeegee paintings inspired by the nature and expressed via the artist’s senses, with the process where revealing the image inside the square frame poses a challenge to the squeegee paintings along with the flatness of the squares and the characteristics of series.

From nature to sensuous revelation
Yoo, Ju-hee’s squeegee paintings started with abstract black-and-white images, where there is no center or frames, no horizontal or vertical direction. The paintings were created by escaping the restrictions of shapes and discarding colors and glamour so that the limitation of the square canvas collides against the formal theory of painting. As the traces of the squeegee flowing from top to bottom and from right to left crash against each other, only the dynamic quality remains on the canvas. One could wonder what is left from Malevich’s supremacist painting; let us focus here on the invisible power hidden in the nature revealed as an abstract image. Can a painting exist in an independent manner in the 21st-century art? We could let ourselves indulge in this interesting imagination. In the movement of the squeegee running up and down and right to left on a monochromatic screen, just as humans’ upright walking and the vertical dynamic of a growing tree on the premise of horizontal existence that is the land, the energy generated between the earth and the sky is revealed by the body and the senses. What would make this possible? The painting itself, rather than the visible objects found in natural spaces, should be on the center. Only then can the artist keep a distance from the subjects of expression and place oneself, the creator, in a free space. It can be said that the reason the squeegee painting holds a special bond to the subjects of senses is related to the painting’s inquiring spirit about the essence of painting pursued by modernism. As the wind is not seen but recognized by the surrounding objects, the material(paint) is a tool that demonstrates the painting act that is the origin of painting. The autonomy of the senses obtained by giving up colors in formalist painting becomes valid in the act of painting with a squeegee.

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