Blue: it is the color that catches the eye and the word that immediately comes to mind when discovering or thinking about the works of Yoo, Ju Hee. A blue that is at the same time deep and luminous, dense and airy. A blue that comes from afar, since the artist remembers that as a teenager, after school, she would go painting every day along the banks of the Seomjin River, very close to where she lived in South Korea, with a pine forest in the background. Between the blue aura these trees cast throughout the country, the different blue of the river, and the blue of the sky which, as she has often recounted, gave her a glimmer of hope, a touch of optimism, and moments of quiet during a difficult period of her life, the blue planets were aligned.

Blue, then, but not just any blue. After working with several shades, sky blue, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, etc., she wanted to have her own. A Yoo Ju Hee blue, as one speaks of Klein blue. One day she came across an anthraquinone blue, a color that, moreover, was rarely used, and it became her signature, her identity. “I feel as though it forces me to commit myself, to put even more of myself into my painting. It is a color that gives the sensation of being drawn inward and that changes beautifully depending on whether I apply one, two, or three layers,” she explains. And this can be seen and felt.

Yoo Ju Hee has not, however, worked exclusively with blue. She has also explored reds, greens, and even yellows in order to experiment with other tones. Each time she liked the result, though not always immediately. But whatever the case, “I love the feeling I experience with anthraquinone,” she says with a smile.

And then there is also black and white, which she used in her beginnings as an easier and more appropriate path toward color, which she has never lost sight of and still enjoys working with today. Black and white as the ideal playground for painting contrasts, one of the major directions of her artistic practice, which also opened the door to her other defining concern: the notion of rhythm. This rhythm she achieves by pushing her colors with a squeegee in a precise gesture, completely mastered and controlled. Each touch seems to be the result of magnificent concentration, breathing, density, spirituality, and meditation, which imprints on the canvas or paper her signs, her writing, her language. For to achieve this effect of rhythm, she must repeat a gesture — as though it were a mantra, a ritual — which itself generates the repetition of the same traces. These become all the richer when viewed more closely, as one realizes they are composed of gradations requiring great attention and subtlety. All the more so because this swarming or dancing, depending on how one sees it, of signs, spots, traces, and layers unfolds against a black background in order to heighten the… contrast.

The circle is thus complete.
But contrasts and rhythms can also emerge from formal oppositions, as can be seen in her recent works. Yoo Ju Hee is thus able to combine within the same canvas a perfectly monochrome flat field of color with streams of white and black paint that seem to fall like a curtain of rain, creating a second contrast between their movement and the stillness of the monochrome area. Or she may not even need that flat field in order to create, vertically or horizontally, the tension that energizes and empowers each work. Furthermore, these aspects are reinforced by the great attention Yoo Ju Hee pays to materiality, to overlaps, to thicknesses as well as to transparencies, edges, and textures.

In short, it is a way of giving herself every possible means to paint emotions, sensations, and impressions. She even says it herself: “My work is emotion.”