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Michael Joo’s work investigates the concepts of identity and knowledge in a hybrid contemporary world. He creates narratives that explore places, people and objects through reinterpreting perception: why do we perceive as we perceive – science and religion, nature versus human intervention, fact versus fiction, high and low culture, sex, and death. 

By juxtaposing humanity’s various pools of knowledge and culture Joo addresses the fluid nature of identity itself. He does so by making use of an extensive variety of medium: video, sculpture, installations out of any sort of material ranging from bamboo to human sweat and cameras, drawing and print making – it seems as if the artist permanently tries to achieve the unachievable: to make us see an object in real life that is barely conceivable as thought alone. 

Improved Rack (Elk 18) (2010) is a wall-mounted sculpture of elk antlers that are cut into pieces and held together by wire, each unit slightly at distance from the next. The work’s form is domineeringly minimalist. However, the organic quality of the medium creates a contradiction, repeating the complex conceptual ideas behind it. Antlers are a sign of dominance and male sexual power: they symbolize a stag’s strength, but they also flatter the hunter who collects them as trophy – as a souvenir of his kill. Antlers are an organic ready-made that represent male potency in multiple ways, where sometimes the death of one leads to the endowment of the other. In this aspect, they share concepts of human identity: the stag has to “shed” his antlers each year to re-grow a bigger version: improvement is coupled with loss, death proceeds growth. Identity is a constant work-in-progress. Joo: “We ‘grow’ and lose, only to re-grow again – a process that is both organic and ‘man-made’. It is limited only by our own capacity to imagine ourselves or to see ourselves as strong beings.” 

Joo is more interested in the way we perceive than in what it is we are looking at in the symbolic as well as the literal sense. For Bodhi Obfuscatus (Space Baby), 2005, Joo surrounds an ancient Buddha sculpture with a matrix of cameras that film the Buddha and project the video onto a second atmosphere of screens. What the artist calls a “space helmet” – the extremely complex process of recoding, transmitting and repeating an object that forms the sculpture as a whole – creates an interaction between viewer and work filtered through modern communication technology. A dialectic evolves that questions the development of identity in modern culture. Joo: “I think that our culture is hungry for ever-increasing complexity in the face of the homogenization effect that our information technology inspires.” 

The seemingly liquid and hybrid environments that Joo creates reflect his own history: born to Korean parents in the United States, a science graduate turned artist, Joo comes from a multi-cultural background with a interdisciplinary academic history. The diversity of reference and material in his work mirrors the complexity and richness, which is so typical of identity – collective and individual – in modern contemporary society. It is a complexity that Joo has experienced and been influenced by since childhood.

Michael Joo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, in 1991, after graduating with a BFA from Washington University, St Louis, 1989. 

Solo exhibitions of his include Galerie Marabini, Bologna, (2010) and Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY (2009); Michael Joo, Palm Beach Institute for Contemporary Art, Florida (2004); the South Korean Pavilion at the 49^th Venice Biennale together with Do-Ho-Suh in 2001; White Cube, London (1998); and Crash, Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London, (1995).

Other Criteria most recently published Michael Joo with an interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Michael Joo, 2007. In 2006, Joo was awarded both the grand prize of the 6^th Gwangju Biennale, Seoul, for Bohdi Obfuscatus (Space Baby) and also the United States Artists Fellowship. 

Group exhibitions include: Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun, Haunch of Venison, Berlin and The Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes, PKM Gallery, Seoul, (both 2010); P.S.1 MoMA, New York, NY (2008); In The Darkest Hour There Will Be Light, Serpentine Gallery, London (2005); The Mind is a Horse, Bloomberg Space, London, (2001); The Whitney Biennale, New York, NY (2000); Institute of Cultural Anxiety, ICA, London and Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away, Serpentine Gallery, London, (both 1994). 

Joo’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the  Samsung Centre for Art and Culture, Seoul.

Image above:

Michael Joo

Doppelganger (Pink Rocinante)
2009
Bronze, enamel paint
195.6 x 193 x 111.8 cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP