Michael Joo has created a new monumental installation for the Smithsonian’s Perspectives contemporary art series.

Perspectives highlights a single artist and has presented large-scale works by internationally renowned contemporary artists including; Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Chiharu Shiota, Do-Ho Suh and Ai Weiwei.

Employing a combination of painting, sculpture, photography, digital scanning and printmaking, Joo’s works investigate the migration patterns of endangered red-crowned cranes living in Korea’s Demilitarized Zone.

Joo used 3D ornithological scans from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (where he was an artist fellow in 2012), to create a four metre high silvered ‘painting’ - applying the abstracted images to canvas using a silver nitrate chemical process derived from early photographic techniques.  A brass rod sculpture suspended from the Sackler Pavilion ceiling, outlines the satellite-tracked migration patterns of the birds - each rod dependent on the other for balance, their lines representing freedom and the inescapability of instinct.

The installation will be on view for a year, during which time the natural light from the windows will interact with the silvered canvas and the sculpture’s lines – altering their appearance depending on the time of day and time of year.

Perspectives: Michael Joo is at Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Pavilion, Washington, D.C., from 2 July – 9 July 2017

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