Yu Jin
Goo
The OA Fine Art galleries present in Paris the original artworks of Yu Jin Goo, Korean artist. Thousands of mother-of-pearl plates, laid one by one onto wood, compose a wave that never stops shifting: the light breaks apart and reassembles with every step you take. Unique pieces, available in the gallery.
The artworks
in the gallery
Mother-of-pearl cannot be photographed: it changes with the place you look from. Move your finger or cursor across an artwork — the reflection follows.
Najeon,
plate by plate
The Korean art of mother-of-pearl is seven centuries old. Almost no one still practises it at this scale, and no one has brought it into contemporary painting as Yu Jin Goo has. Here is what happens before the artwork exists.
- The shell Abalone, conch, freshwater nacre. The material is not manufactured: it is sorted, shell by shell, for its hue and its thickness.
- The cutting Each plate is thinned to transparency, then cut. A few tenths of a millimetre: at that fineness the light passes through and breaks apart.
- The laying Thousands of plates, angled one by one onto the wood panel. The tilt of each decides the direction of its reflection — this is where the wave is made.
- The polishing The surface is worked until it answers the light as one whole. No pigment is added: every colour comes from the shell.
Several months per artwork. That is what explains the rarity — and why no two pieces can ever be identical.
Yu Jin Goo is one of the few to have taken najeon out of furniture and brought it to the scale of painting.
A private viewing,
for you alone
Our gallerists receive you in Paris. For the space of an appointment, the artworks are seen in the light of our rooms: estimate, provenance, hanging and financing are then discussed as they should be — in front of the work itself.
- Left Bank
- 19 rue Mazarine, Paris 6th
- Right Bank
- 15 rue de Miromesnil, Paris 8th
- Opening hours
- Monday to Saturday, 10 am – 6.30 pm
- Reply
- Within one business day, from a gallerist
The gesture,
the matter,
the light
Yu Jin Goo, born in 1965 in South Korea, has pursued a single question for thirty years: how to bring najeon — the traditional Korean art of mother-of-pearl — into the painting of our time. His works are neither quite paintings nor quite reliefs: they are surfaces that answer the light, and change with the hour of the day and the place you stand.
A work of patience
Each artwork is born of thousands of mother-of-pearl plates, cut and laid one by one onto the wood panel. Nothing is painted: the colour comes from the shell itself. It is work of rare physical demand, in which the time spent on the surface is measured in months rather than days.
Light added, never mixed
Mixed pigment darkens. Light, on the contrary, grows brighter. Yu Jin Goo works this second law: nacre, a transparent crystal of calcium, breaks white apart like a prism and returns it in blues, pinks and greens. The surface then comes alive like a body of water rather than a picture.
The wave, as motif
His two series — Space of Circulation and Space of Thought — take up the movement of the wave, which he calls Multiple Wave. The work never gives itself all at once: it shifts with the height of your gaze, the hour of the day, the visitor's step.
A material five hundred million years old
The shells from which nacre comes are among the oldest forms of life on the planet. The artist sees in them a living fossil: a matter that has crossed the eras accumulating sediment, and that therefore carries a memory no pigment could hold.
Why Yu Jin Goo belongs in a collection
He holds a singular place in the market: a Korean artist whose technique has no equivalent, with an output necessarily limited by the slowness of the gesture. His works are sought in Asia as in Europe, and their effect in a room is immediate — they are the piece a visitor walks towards.
Request an estimate
A gallerist replies within one business day, with the estimate, the availability and the acquisition terms for each artwork.
Side by side on one wall, hung 4 ft 11 in from the floor as in the gallery.
Your selection The artworks you add gather in a bar at the foot of the page. From there you can compare them at true scale on a wall, request a single estimate for them all, or share the selection by link.