Michael Joo

Much like Joseph Beuys, Joo uses various media such as sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, further referencing cultural heritage, identity, and natural history.

Joo’s artworks often blend and collide seemingly disparate elements such as science and religion, fact versus fiction, and high and low culture.

Using a range of materials and media, and with an emphasis on process, Joo juxtaposes humanity’s various states of knowledge and culture, addressing the fluid nature of identity itself, and prompting us to question how and why we perceive the world as we do.

In performance/video works, he has swum through a ton of MSG, waited in the wild for elk to lick salt off of his body, and walked against the flow of crude oil along the Trans Alaskan Pipeline.

Footage from the first site, the artist’s studio in New York’s Chinatown district, includes a bath or swim through two thousand pounds of monosodium glutamate (MSG).

A urethane foam-carved replica of the record setting speed car, "the Blue Flame" was also displayed atop a plinth of Monosodium Glutamate bags and alongside a cast rubber 5-gallon fuel canister.

Two additional performance videos on monitors resting atop columns of pressure cast salt blocks played simultaneously and out of synch so content was in constant flux.

One video showed the artist trying to balance a large glass level filled with liquid mercury and the other presented stock footage of the Blue Flame shot in Utah during speed trials.

"God II", 2003, 40" x 61" x 61", Cast urethane, polyethylene plastic, cotton, leather, seal, wolf, rubber, plexiglass base with refrigerated top surface.

Over time, the condensed breath of viewers combines with humidity in the work's immediate environment to form thick layers of frost that begin to fuse with and obscure the figure.

The work was later shown in Joo's 2003 retrospective at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Serpentine Gallery in the Damien Hirst curated exhibition "In the Darkest Hour There May Be Light (2006).

Shot in several locations across Alaska, it consists of three distinct video segments involving themes of time and decay, first and third worlds (as implied by a frontier), sociological vs. psychological, corruption/consumption and revelation.

The shoot For the second, flanking segment, Joo placed a sculpted and taxidermied Caribou outfitted internally (and externally) with infrared security cameras into the Denali wilderness, recording its encounter and interactive absorption over time by the elements, insects, expanding intestines, and a wolf.