Biography
Born in 1964 in Seoul, Républic of Korea.
Lives and works in France.
Desire is the underlying theme of all of Yoo Hye-Sook’s work. She reveals this fundamental and animal-like desire in each of the mundane objects she chooses to study with the painstaking attention to detail that is her trademark. Someone’s hair, underwear, a fur coat become more than their physical incarnation to become sensuous and intriguing specimens, even veering toward eeriness. In other works that tend towards abstraction works, desire turns into a destructive force. The artist uses pencil like a dagger to pierce through Hanji, an extremely thin traditional Korean paper. Bewilderment ensues: cosmic system or microscopic view ? Fragment or Grand All ? With an economy of means (pencil, paper, canvas and space), Yoo Hye-Sook has instinctively given shape to an interrogation that characterises all her work: how to make visible the ‘other reality’ that lies beneath?
Some artworks
Some artworks
Exhibitions
Acte II
Yoo Hye-Sook
16.05 – 12.07.2025
In her new studio on the 14th floor, Yoo Hye-Sook enjoys a 270-degree opening.
There, she sets her pace to the sun, between dawn, zenith, and the grand evening finale. Basking in that light, the artist seems to have absorbed it to translate it into her paintings. Covering the entire spectrum —from the golden pinkish beige of dawn to the luminously deep blue of dusk, from electric yellows to nocturnal greens—, shades are juxtaposed like fine gauze to create vibrant surfaces. Either through bare brushes or powerful strokes, her work shows humility, seeking simply to faire présence —to create presence.
Le jour vient
Yoo Hye-Sook
08.09 – 12.11.2022
The canvas becomes a wall. A vibration is created between the pigments on the surface and the darkness of the hollows, where the pencil does not penetrate. At first, you see almost nothing. Then, through contemplation, the perceptive capacities and the gaze sharpen and refine. In hundreds, even thousands of lines, Yoo Hye-Sook gently awakens a presence. A murmured form, a halo, a shadow, an opening: a genesis that the attentive eye perceives without managing to embrace it.
Foyers (Hearths)
Yoo Hye-Sook
23.05 – 16.06.2018
You have never been there and you will never go, but you know this place although it does not exist. Contradictory, yes and no. In her recent works, Hye-Sook suggests a space, a location she knows without knowing it, a place that isn’t one, but provokes a reaction. For her, it’s about the exploration of an indefinite, born from the simple pleasure of hearing and seeing the pencil go over the canvas.
Through these artworks which seem minimalist and almost inscrutable, Yoo Hye-Sook manages to awaken more primary registers, activate our senses, while offering a foray towards an elsewhere.
