Ⅰ.
Ju-Hee Yoo is a single-color artist. She does even enjoy drawing using "Anthraquinne blue." This color has a characteristics of translucent and deep taste like a dark night sky or a cool shadow. Ju-Hee Yoo especially prefers this color among many blue colors. Why? In an interview, she has once said:
"What's important in my work is color. The anthraquinone blue I chose represents brightness and hope when lightly painted, but when overlapped several times, it represents a deep dark world. It's also a special color for me because I can express it appropriately, encompassing all my inner thoughts and philosophical things.”1)
In fact, though it is not that Ju-Hee Yoo never uses other colors such as black, white, green, and red at all, but "Anthraquinne blue" now feels like Ju-Hee Yoo's “color“ because she mainly uses this color. However, as mentioned for a while, other painters generally avoids this color because it feels deep and dark. Rather, they prefer to use a lot Ultramarine blue, which has the scent of the Mediterranean Sea, or Sky blue, which feels light and bright, or IKB (International Klein Blue)2), a very deep and dark blue.
Then, why did Ju-Hee Yoo like blue extraordinarily? According to her recollection, her childhood experience, from Hadong, Gyeongsangnam-do, is a reason. She guesses the natural scenery surrounding the blue river, pine forest, and sand fields that she saw while playing with her friends in the Seomjingang River in Hadong helped her a lot in forming her aesthetic sense. In fact, it can be seen that these factors are well illustrated in a series of blue monochromatic paintings drawn later. For example, the series <Repetition-Trace of Meditation", Acrylic on canvas, 100x100cm, 145x145cm, 2017> is reminiscent of a landscape viewed from above the thin waving surface of water, although the nuances of subtle colors are different. 3)
It is not an exaggeration to say that it is a landscape of water viewed from a proper distance rather than a monochromatic abstraction. Therefore, like it is not an exaggeration to say that David Hockney's wave paintings are abstractive painting rather than figurative painting when limited to the wave part, it is not an overstatement to say that the monochromatic paintings drawn by Ju-Hee Yoo's squeegee are figurative rather than abstractive. This is because, from a certain point of view, the waves seem to be expressed in this picture.
One question is drawn from this. What is abstractive and what is figurative? Is it a figurative if you see a specific form, and is it an abstractive if you don't have a reproducible property? If you can't recognize the shape because it's tangled like a thread, it's abstractive, and if you draw the worms tangled like thread as if they are the worms, is it a figurative? Where is the boundary between figurative and abstractive?
These questions clearly belong to the task of art philosophy. Then what about Ju-Hee Yoo's work? In the same sense, it can be seen that it results in an important question of art philosophy.
Ⅱ.
Ju-Hee Yoo's series of <Repetition-Trace of Meditation> is the result of repetitive actions, as the title implies. It is rooted in her unique pictorial technique of painting using squeegee, which has been continuously developed since the early 2000s, when Ju-Hee Yoo began her work, until now. The reason why it is called "her unique" here is because Ju-Hee Yoo is the only author among Korea's well-known monochromatic artists who has used squeegee for such a long time. Therefore, it can be said that the production method of repetitive performance by squeegee is unique to her devised by Ju-Hee Yoo.
Ju-Hee Yoo's series of <Repetition-Trace of Meditation> is the result of repetitive actions, as the title implies. It is rooted in her unique pictorial technique of painting using squeegee, which has been continuously developed since the early 2000s, when Ju-Hee Yoo began her work, until now. The reason why it is called "her unique" here is because Ju-Hee Yoo is the only author among Korea's well-known monochromatic artists who have used squeegee for such a long time. Therefore, it can be said that the production method of repetitive performance by squeegee is unique to her devised by Ju-Hee Yoo.
Looking at Ju-Hee Yoo's works around 2001, which correspond to the early days, it can be seen that they are significantly different from recent works. First of all, there is no 'staccato' technique to cut off and leave a trace of the squeegee. The series of <Form-State/Shape>, in which black and white acrylic paint was put on top of the raw linen and pushed with squeegee, are works with rich compositional colors. It initially had a design of "ㄴ" shape cutting the screen, but in accordance with the 'all-over painting' custom of experimenting in the same year, it immediately moved on to the form of a black painting, where the black lead followed by white, that is, the white appears infrequently. Of course, there was an experiment in the middle of the process that left one corner of the canvas blank, but it is assumed that the period was not very long.
Ⅲ.
At the time reaching the series of "Landscape over Being," Ju-Hee Yoo finally begins to think about "the landscape." That is roughly the period from 2004 to 2009. 4)
The characteristic of the painting at this time is that a horizontally long colored surface appears at the bottom of the canvas screen, neatly colored in a single color. In addition, the color surface has various colors such as blue, black, brown, beige, and light green, and on the top of it, it appears a wide area of color, in which black and white are mixed by being pushed with a squeegee. Is this a landscape? It may be so. In particular, the basis for viewing this painting as an abstract landscape lies in the horizon across the screen and the traces of radical squeegees that seem to fluctuate above it. At first glance, the scenery created by this series of paintings is reminiscent of a stormy, wild and bleak night sky. The sticky black and white acrylic paint is placed on the squeegee, repeatedly vertically and horizontally, and the push force is vividly felt in this series. Ju-Hee Yoo's lively performance is further amplified by the tranquility created by the calm wide color surface at the bottom of the screen. As if it were a metaphor for a life filled with emotions of joy, sorrow, love and anger, Ju-Hee Yoo's contemplating expression, which appeared in the middle age, attracts attention.
After a relatively short period of <Blue> and <Untitled>" Ju-Hee Yoo finally moved on to the period of <Repeat-Trace of Meditation> (2009-present), which occupied the longest period. The technique that appeared during this period is the traces of a squeegee that is cut short in the 'staccato' style. The colors are mainly blue, sometimes various with beige, light green, brown, black, red, etc. Ju-Hee Yoo also experimented with installation using boxes to avoid getting bored with the long-lasting "staccato" squeegee technique (before the Exhibition of Sarajevo/Bosnia Herzegovina 'Eco-Sensibility'), and also conducted an experiment in which she pushed with a squeegee and then added her performance with her fingers.
As a metaphor for nature such as water, sky, and forest, Ju-Hee Yoo's monochromatic painting has a meditative and healing effect. Nature, which Ju-Hee Yoo chose as the subject of her work, corresponds to "die Heimat," in Heidegger's words, where spiritual humans must return soon. Humans who are destined to visit their hometown someday take mental rest by being held in the arms of nature. Ju-Hee Yoo's painting has great significance from that point of view.
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1) Soo-young Kim's picture letter, Ju-Hee Yoo's Repetition Trace of Meditation, Yeongnam Ilbo, October 19, 2018.
2) It refers to the blue color invented by Yve Klein, a French neo-realist writer.
3) A distinct example of a work that can be associated with this is a series of landscape paintings that simply depict fluctuating waves as white thin curves, such as David 4) Hockney's <A Bigger Splash, 1967> and <Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures)/1972>.
5) Ju-Hee Yoo's collection of paintings, 01-19 JU-HEE YOO, Repetition-Trace of Meditiaton/Blue/Untitled/Landscape over Being/Form-State Shape, 2019