Joo Yeon Woo's
 Red Star

Joo Yeon Woo’s new series Do Not Draw a Red Star is an ambitious installation composed of meticulously arranged cut-out paper shapes, foregrounding the use of materiality and repetition as central to the work’s conceptual theme of artistic censorship–either self-imposed or collectively enforced. Large-scale, laser-cut red paper images are emphatically framed, while smaller red images float freely, generating tension between formal structure and the seeming spontaneity of their composition. At a cursory glance, the installation might remind viewers of the innocent scribbles of a child, but upon closer inspection, the work reveals a complex iconography: red stars, figures, textbook images of children as good students, animals, and even text such as “Yikes,” demonstrating an intentional critique of historical and cultural symbols. The overwhelming presence of red in Woo’s paper cut-outs carries significant symbolic weight, deliberately summoning associations with both personal and collective trauma. Her previous series of Gyopo Portraits and this series of Do Not Draw a Red Star have become a musical suite of a prelude and a coda.  While her previous works, executed in white embossed paper, visually narrated the lives of diasporic individuals, Do Not Draw a Red Star engages audiences with broader socio-political contexts—particularly Woo’s reflection on her childhood in a society fraught with communist-phobia during the height of the Cold War.

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The aesthetic choices in Red are intertwined with Woo’s diasporic subjectivity, as she interrogates the legacies of the Pacific Rim’s Cold War ideologies in the 1980s. In her critique of historical memory, Woo explores the enforced cultural prohibitions around the color “red”—an emblem of North Korea’s communist associations—recalling how, in her youth, red was a forbidden hue within the artistic and pedagogical environments shaped by anti-communist propaganda. This prohibition mirrors larger structures of censorship and political indoctrination, which the artist now revisits and subverts through the unapologetic use of the same color.

 

Her own project of narrating home and homeland highlighted the experiences and traumas of displaced people like artist Joo Yeon Woo. In the Gyopo series [meaning overseas brethren out of the same ethnic origin], Woo encountered Korean people living in the United States at several Korean-language schools established to teach Korean heritage to their children. In this series Red, Woo faces her hometown’s collective trauma of eliminating the North Korean soldiers and Communist sympathizers represented by “reds” or “commies.” For the Gyopo series on embossed paper, Woo traced Korean faces collected from Korean ethnic newspapers circulated in the U.S. In this series, Woo collected many drawings from her own family and friends.

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In this series, Woo’s autobiographical narratives resurface as her brave confrontation with both personal and geopolitical history. The inclusion of her childhood memories—such as the drawing of a “red monster” for an anti-communist art competition or watching a children’s animation General Ttoli, shown in 1978 and 1979 at major theaters—highlights the intersection between childhood innocence and her generation’s ideological upbringing. The large red pig figure, a recurring motif in the installation, gestures toward both fecundity and subversion, referencing not only Asian symbols of prosperity but also the zoomorphism of communist propaganda. This visual motif recalls the outlandish caricatures in anti-communist media, aligning Woo’s work with satirical critiques—familiar to those animal characters as communist comrades in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

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Woo’s engagement with diasporic experience continues in her depictions of the psychological and physical proximities between her current life in South Florida and her memories of geopolitical “neighbors” represented as communist “pigs.” Her work problematizes the nostalgic recollections of her past, revealing how political ideologies permeated childhood, shaping the identities of generations. By invoking such potent imagery, Woo confronts the limitations imposed on creative expression, particularly in the fraught political landscapes she navigates both as an artist and as a member of the Korean diaspora.

 

In the current geopolitical climate—marked by rising tensions in places like Gaza and Ukraine—Woo’s work resonates on a global scale. Her reference to the pursuit of happiness and the right to free speech, foundational ideals in American democracy, becomes a critical commentary on the contradictions inherent in systems that simultaneously promote and restrict freedom. Through this installation, Woo achieves self-liberation, reclaiming the color “red” and recontextualizing it as both a personal and political act of resistance.

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“Do Not Draw a Red Star” Joo Woo, AIR Gallery, 155 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, November 16 through December 15, 2024

 

Images: Do Not Draw a Red Star, Joo Woo, 2024, Installation views. Photo's courtesy of The Ringling

 

About the author: 

Dr. Kyunghee Pyun is an art critic and professor of art history at FIT in New York City. Her research focuses on the history of collecting, the reception of Asian art in Europe and North America, and Asian American visual culture.