Juo You-ruei was born in Nanzhou, Pingtung in 1950. Her parents were from Guangdong and moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government in 1948. She entered the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University in 1969 and won the First Prize in the category of oil painting at the 28th Annual Provincial Art Exhibition when she was 23 years old. In the year of 1975, Juo You-Ruei held her first solo exhibition at American Cultural Center. The large-scale painting “Banana Series” received much attention and discussion at that time. In the next year, Juo You-Reui went to State University of New York at Albany for advanced studies. After graduating with the master’s degree, she stayed in New York. Because of the economic situation of his family, Juo You-Reui had to temporarily give up her artistic career and found another job to make a living. She began her career as a full-time artist in 1988.

Using photography and projector as supporting tools to work on detailed realistic paintings has always been the way how Juo You-Reui works. Since her “Banana Series” in 1975, Juo You-Reui had not exhibited any new work until “Shadow Series” in 1986. The illusionary light-and-shadow and the traces of time are the main theme of this series, while the city landscape becomes the subject of her paintings. In the 1990s, Juo You-Reui turned to the “wall” as the focus of her artistic practice. The way of her art-making process remained the same, but the depth of field was shortened and close. The wall’s texture is visualized in a detailed realistic way, visually bringing certain abstract touch to the work. It has also become Juo You-Reui’s unique style. In 2005, Juo You-Reui moved to Hong Kong, while the beautiful landscape of the city was thus rendered in her painting.

A brick wall, a mud wall and some tubes are portrayed through a highly realist, detailed approach in 9706. The riotous light and shades, when reflected onto different kinds of walls, result in different visual expressions. Through a gaze upon the daily life scene, the author renders the small, touching moments in life so poetically.

In the late 1960s, Photographic Realism started to develop in the USA. Artists took photos with camera and used a slide projector to project the images on the canvas. During the process, artists were allowed to acquire exact shapes and colors. When Juo You-Reui was in college, she started adopting realistic painting as the focus of her artistic practice. Through the images in the catalogues from Hong Kong, she had indirect access to the photographic realistic paintings in the USA. After graduating, she soon tried to use the slide projector as the supporting tool, with which she created “Banana Series.” At that time, people in Taiwan had limited understanding about photographic realistic paintings. Juo You-Reui was one of the pioneers who worked on such a technique and exhibited a great amount of photographic realistic paintings. Such an artistic practice had been widely adopted by the Taiwanese nativist realistic painters in the late 1970s.

The American photographic realistic painting is very conceptual and material. The artists consider the precise painting visualized through photographic realistic technique as the combination of abstract elements such as color, line, and plane. Although it is realistic, it does not narrate the content. In Juo You-Reui’s Banana Series, Shadow Series, Door Series, and Wall Series, however, viewers can always feel the sentimental emotions about the passing of time and history. The artist is indeed reveals her sensitivity to the daily subtlety, expressing the ordinary poetry in a realistic way.