"Golden city" Drawing

Jaehee Yoo is a Korean contemporary artist whose practice explores how memory, time, and relationships gradually shape our experience of place. Working with traditional Korean materials—including silk, ink, bamboo pen, natural pigments, and gold—she creates paintings that exist between figuration and abstraction, where images emerge through stillness rather than description.

Rather than depicting landscapes as fixed views, Yoo understands them as psychological and relational spaces. Her works do not seek to record places, but to reveal how a place slowly becomes part of our inner world through walking, waiting, lived experience, and memory. The city, nature, and human relationships are approached as interconnected environments that shape one another over time.

Rooted in the philosophy and material tradition of East Asian painting while engaging with contemporary life, her practice is guided by intuition before reflection. Each painting begins without a predetermined image, allowing the work to evolve through the rhythms of breath, chance, and attentive observation. Gold is used not as a symbol of luxury or the sacred, but as a quiet presence that invites stillness, waiting, and contemplation.

Yoo has exhibited internationally in Seoul, London, Barcelona, Miami, and New York. Her ongoing series, **Memory Diaries**, investigates how relationships become memories and how memories gradually transform into landscapes. Her current research expands this inquiry through **Place Becoming**, a project exploring the transformation of environment into landscape through walking, attention, and the lived relationship between body and place.

Her paintings invite viewers not simply to look, but to pause—to encounter their own memories, relationships, and sense of belonging within the quiet space of the image.