Kay Yoo's Projects

MFA Student

Major: Photography

Graduation Year: 2019

Artist Statement:

Driven by the desire to explore the human figure and how it functions as a site of beauty and emotion, Kay Yoo works in black and white large format portrait photography to focus on how the detail and composition of a figure can embody desire. Formally trained as a sculptor, she investigates subtlety into the body that she could not capture through sculpture.

Yoo’s current work, Coplans Reclining Figure, 1996, recreates iconic self-portraits by master photographer John Coplans. Attracted to the raw, unedited depiction of Coplans, Yoo’s work commits to treating herself similarly in these recreations, resisting the contemporary impulse to edit and sanitize images of her own body including a depiction of her face. As a young Asian female her work is immediately differentiated from Coplans’ work and describes her longing for the privileged positionality of the white, male photographer. As such, she again evokes our attention to what differentiates herself from Coplans’ and brings us to the subjectivity of the human figure.

Biography:

Kay Yoo (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) is a photographer based in Flagstaff, Arizona. Driven by the desire to explore the human figure and how it functions as a site of beauty and emotion, she works in black and white large format portrait photography. Inspired by the art and culture of Seoul, she pursued her BFA in Sculpture from Ewha Womans University. There she was inspired by Renaissance representations of the human figure, and her work began focusing on how the detail and composition of a figure can embody emotion.

After working outside the field of art for several years, Yoo was drawn back to a studio practice out of a desire to return the challenges of a creative pursuit. This led her to enroll as an MFA candidate at Maine College of Art. Fascinated by the work of rendering three dimensional subjects into two dimensions, her work has been primarily in figurative photography.