Michael Joo, unlike many of his contemporaries, employs a rarely seen range of language and structure. His work represents a turning point in early 21st-century sculpture. Like Beuys, he creates a rich and complex oeuvre that is often misunderstood.
Touted as shamanistic by some due to this reflective nature, Joo’s art embodies the eclectic character of the information age. His work represents the reaction of an artist bombarded by image upon image, page upon page of seemingly miscellaneous elements.
Joo proposes not only a re-examination of western identity in light of this assimilated information, but also a re-evaluation of the language of form in contemporary sculpture. For him, it is necessary for art to come to terms with this new environment and the new juxtapositions it enables.
This fluctuating, hybrid environment reflects the history of Joo’s own identity. The diversity of his references and materials in some ways mirrors his multi-cultural upbringing. Each work gives a sense of richness and complexity, of the artist sharing multiple cultural references,
both personally and through a world fuelled by a subdividing narrative content. As Joo describes it, there is no linear journey in reading his works as a body; instead, they cross-connect, disconnect, and reconnect to reflect the labyrinthine nature of the world as its narratives expand, touch, and overlap exponentially.
Joo's work formulates far more than a singular and linear flow of events, creating multi-temporal pathways, a plurality echoing the nebulous flows of perception, information, and identity.
Having followed Joo’s career since his appearance in the 1995 exhibition "Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away" at the Serpentine Gallery in London, I have often been struck by his juxtapositions of form and substance and the almost biospheric nature of his sculpture.
Joo creates a universe in which the viewer exists; this artistic environment emulates a closed system operating ostensibly within a fragile balance between energy and "body," abstraction and narrative.
His sculptures and installations have been described as "concrete poetry" and "hermetic philosophy." These are multi-faceted systems within systems, operating physically, metaphysically, alchemically, poetically, and conceptually (not to mention, synthetically and politically).
In his recent installation at the Asia Society in New York, Bodhi Obfuscatus (Space Baby), Joo demonstrates that he is more interested in the way we perceive than in what it is we are looking at. The work established an interaction between viewer and sculpture filtered through an interface.
This was an operation that worked in much the same way as we receive secondary and tertiary information on a daily basis via modern technology. If, as Joo has stated, information implies a truth, then the appropriation and transmission of this face serves to strengthen its position in relation to the viewer.
This creates a dialectic between identities and cultures, in this instance, Eastern deities and Western contemporary audiences, and even the juxtaposition of time frames. The Buddha, a deity but also a man, trades positions and hence meanings with the viewer.
A form of information, via the reading of an art object, causes the temporal pathway of the work to flow in either direction: the viewer can be Buddha and Buddha may be the viewer. This exchange is realized through Bodhi Obfuscatus'slive-feed images of the sculpted face of another work of art.
A comprehensive selection of Joo's works will be shown later this year in a solo exhibition at the Bohen Foundation in New York. This large-scale survey follows last-year's exhibition of 60 works organized by the List Visual Arts Center at MIT and shown at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art inFlorida. The Bohen show will include about 100 sculptures arranged in an installation format, as well as a nine-image video piece.
Paul Black: Your recent installation at the Asia Society included a life-sized third-century Pakistani Buddha sculpture from the Rockefeller collection of Asian art. You surrounded the figure's head with a two-foot-diameter matrix of 54 tiny bullet cameras.
These created a mask for the Buddha, transmitting an image of every square inch of surface area on the sculpture's face. You describe this camera construction as a "space helmet" that transforms the macro nature of the facial segments into abstraction.
They then reform on another, surrounding matrix of LCD, plasma, and projection screens, and mirrors, returning to representation.
Michael Joo: The face, obscured by this space helmet/camera, could be seen as being turned inside out. Both the viewer and the sculpture are implicated in the myriad reflections on the mirrors and live-video feed screens.
PB: It seems that through our technological evolution we have opened up the globe and its cultural associations; meanings are far more diverse and complex in the reading of a work. We can search for information globally at the touch of a button and juxtapose seemingly disparate images and concepts. In some ways your work reflects that complexity.
MJ: I think that our culture is hungry for ever-increasing complexity in the face of the homogenizing effect that our information technology inspires. Because of the voice given to the individual on the Internet, and through cell phones, narrative content abounds in life as it does in contemporary art.
In this way, the complexity of content generated by our increasing awareness of others and how we negotiate our material world parallels the evolution of the hardware itself. I’m interested in how we process these increasingly complex realities and the fact that we will not evolve physically at the same pace.
The complex network of non-hierarchical information that exists in the work is a recurring theme. It refers to both the digestion of an information overload (six degrees of Kevin Bacon), as well as to the artist’s thought process itself—what Robert Smithson compared to a “dog scanning a site.” I am drawn to the idea that in this process both intuition and social conditioning/breeding could work together.
In the next article we continue the conversation with Michael Joo
