Haeri Yoo

Born Sangju, Korea, 1970; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Artist Haeri Yoo works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and site-specific wall installations.  Tiny insect-like drawings become a repository of bodies and forms to be pasted or bricolaged into other works, while minute sculptural entities are constructed and posted on pins, like butterfly specimens, on the wall.  Despite the often charming titles of the works they inhabit, these not-quite human figures and anthropomorphic monsters vacillate between playfulness and menace, between sexuality and violence.  Their unsettling presence is magnified when they are enlarged in wall murals or begin to impinge upon the viewer’s space as three-dimensional forms.

Yoo cites her Korean heritage for “an acute awareness of negative space” and the importance of spontaneous mark making as she explores “human sexuality, bodily tensions, illicit thought and oppression” in her work.¹ In a joint statement for the 2007 AHL foundation awards, supporting the work of Korean and Korean-American artists in the U.S., jurors wrote of Yoo:  “In both her small studies and large murals, there is a sensation of exposed nerve endings, a refusal or inability to censor whatever arises while enacting what André Breton called ‘pure psychic automatism’….With their bold figuration and chromatic range, Haeri Yoo’s excitingly uninhibited paintings pack the double punch of intense feeling and substantive materiality.”²

¹ Artist’s statement, spring 2008.

² Robert Berlind, Marcin Ramocki, and Lilly Wei, in Fresh Illusions, 2007, p.11.