H E E J U Y O O
C.V
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Bachelor of Arts, Painting
–GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Rye Gallery Printed Digital Art. Rye, New Hampshire 10, 2014
Herter Gallery, University of Massachusetts Transcendent Narratives Amherst, Massachusetts 10, 2023
–EXPERIENCE
Korean Cultural Service of Massachusetts President Orange, Massachusetts 03, 2011 – Present
– Opened a Korean language school in Leominster, Massachusetts for children four to eighteen of various linguistic experiences and abilities
– Established a Korean library with a catalog of over 6,000 books in the Korean language in collaboration with authors, poets, publishing companies, and a global shipping company
– Directed poetry reading events in the Korean and English language (Exhibit)
PUBLISHED WORKS
Heeju Yoo._소란이 환하다._PRUNSASANG._KOREA. June 2019
Heeju Yoo._기억이 풍기는 봄밤._PRUNSASANG._KOREA. June 2016
Heeju Yoo._엄마의 연애._PRUNSASANG._KOREA. June 2014
Heeju Yoo._떨어져나간 것들이 나를 살핀다._LITERATURE&THOUGHT._KOREAbMay 2012
AWARDS
May, 2023 Gordon Scholarship University of Massachusetts Amherst
Work Statement
I create art in two ways. First, I do pure painting. I express each person’s time in the real world and the story of people. In my imagination, each person’s time is like line breaks that spread into the air. I hope that people can see the human soul and their time through my art with various colors and brush strokes. Second, I use mixed technique painting and sculpture with recycled materials.
The process of doing these two works is very different. My painted works are achieved through imagination and a plan of the composition. It is done with my own will. However, when I create work using recycled materials, the raw items bring out the imagination from my mind. The recycled goods guide the inspiration, not my will.
I find inspiration in mankind’s history, from smelling very old paper when I open an old book. This holds a very special meaning for me. I am interested in geography because I get inspired when I walk along paths with fossils of shrimp and fossils of dinosaur footprints. Also, I recognize that the light I see is from hundreds of millions of years ago. I convey life and death through my artwork. In my mysterious imagination, each person’s time breaks and spreads in the air and floats all over the world, so living people can see their souls and their lived times. It is also about communicating with missing people. I think color proves to us that the soul and time are in sunlight. This kind of imagination was possible when one knew quantum physics at a simple level. My mom passed away last winter, but I think her soul was imbued with the sky with the colors. Sunlight helps us see missed people. She is floating everywhere and always looking at me. I like to feel the time to seep into my heart. If I walk down the street on a sunny day, the sunlight shimmers. It is like a sunlight-haze. After living on one of the stars as the earth, the people’s body returns to the soil and the soul becomes an atom in the universe. I think the time of people’s lives are floating in the universe, and I feel it when the weather is bright and sunny. Sometimes it’s sad to me, but it made me equipped with a life philosophy that I can’t waste even a single moment. I like to see things or space as if I were seeing them from a see-through perspective. This thought allowed me to change my perspective when seeing and reading visible things. This informs the many layers of color in my paintings.
In the same context, among the discarded items, I use recycled materials that can evoke history and explore our developmental social consciousness. When I see an old and abandoned object. With that material, I imagine the material’s history and I imagine what they did. Then I create an image that compresses an important scene of that story into a metaphor.Since childhood and when I was young, it has become a habit to use recyclables due to not being financially sufficient. As I started art, this habit became my fundamental energy of creation, to describe the way I discover and give meaning to materials.
The opportunity to learn came too late to me, but I’m walking with hope to become a better artist without missing the opportunity. I got inspiration from the German painter Anselm Kiefer. I gained freedom in the choice of materials along with the expansion of my imagination. I learned from Jackson Pollock the possibility of fully expressing imagination without necessarily expressing images
From now on, when recycled materials whisper to me, I will listen carefully to their stories and incorporate their history into my art. In painting, I would like to express how the human soul shines in every corner of the Earth and how it flies in space.
I often write a poem first and then paint the manifestation of my imagination. Sometimes, I paint and write later. I would like to work more intensively on combining poems and paintings. If I were to hold an exhibition, I would like to research how to effectively convey my feelings and dreams in both poetry and artwork to the audience. Furthermore, it’s my dream to further make the intersection of these mediums more accessible to the public through a written collection.