Joo Yeon Woo

Assistant Professor, Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media
MFA, The Pennsylvania State University | MFA, Hongik University, Korea
Phone: 813.974.2360
Email: woo@usf.edu
Office: FAH 250

Gallery: http://joowoo.net

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, paintings, photography, and installation. In her recent project, Gyopo Portraits (2017-ongoing), she fuses formal drawing with the embossing technique to render the figures virtually invisible. Woo maximizes the notions of void and space, and refined simplicity which harks back to the Korean traditional aesthetic. The word Gyopo in the title references the term used for Koreans who live overseas. Cross-cultural immigrant experience is further explored in her newest sumi-ink works on paper, Sound Words (2018-ongoing), in which Woo illustrates her mindscape by translating the subjective feelings and onomatopoetic words.

Woo has exhibited works nationally and internationally at institutions including the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, The Academy of Fine Arts Sarajevo in Bosnia, the Sejong Museum of Art in Korea, The Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Palestine, the Center for Global Justice in Mexico, and the University of the Andes in Colombia. She has participated in international artist-in-residence programs, including the VCCA in Virginia, the Red Gate Residency in Beijing, and the Contemporary Yunnan in China. She also received the AHL Contemporary Art Award in NYC, the Korean National Art Festival Award at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Woo received a BFA from Kyungpook National University in Korea, an MFA from Hongik University in Korea, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.