A.I.R Gallery is pleased to announce Do not draw a red star, a solo exhibition of hand-painted paper cutouts by Alum Artist Joo Woo. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Woo’s immigration from South Korea to the United States, the collaged imagery in Do Not Draw a Red Star reflects the intricate layers of the artist’s identity and the personal stories that have influenced her practice.

Do not draw a red star consists of over one-hundred painted cutouts reflecting the diverse elements that have shaped Woo’s life and the multiple roles she inhabits as an immigrant, Asian, woman, artist, teacher, and mother. Spanning decades, the imagery in the collage is mined from Woo’s personal collection and various vintage sources from her home country, including Buddhist amulets sent to her by her father over the course of twenty years, Japanese cartoon books from her adolescence, and Korean textbooks from the 1970s and 1980s. Other imagery in the installation is more recent: included in the cutouts are old drawings made by her children, as well as typographies from "Stop asian hate" protests in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anti-communist ideologies were pervasive in South Korea in the 1980s, and the red hues and star motifs repeated throughout the exhibition—as well as the title itself—recall Woo’s memory of being forbidden to draw red stars in her childhood art classes. Some of the cutouts are pasted together to create discrete, framed collages, while others are affixed directly to the wall. Resisting didacticism, Woo opts for a random display with overlapping arrangements of imagery, allowing narratives to unfold without a chronological order. As viewers immerse themselves in the curated chaos, the images do not immediately reveal themselves, encouraging multiple interpretations and mirroring the fragmented nature of the artist’s own life.

Joo Woo has exhibited widely, including at the Tampa Museum of Art in Tampa, the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, the AHL Foundation in New York City, and the Sejong Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea. Woo is currently an associate professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South Florida, Tampa.