Michael Joo
Bio
Employing diverse media and materials, Korean-American artist Michael Joo (b. 1966, New York, USA) draws together creative and scientific modes in innovative conceptual work that reflects on the intersection between technology, perception, and the natural environment. Joo’s materials are as diverse as his body of research, ranging from human sweat, silver nitrate, and bamboo.
Major exhibitions of Joo's work include Perspectives: Michael Joo, Smithsonian Freer | Sackler Museum, Washington, DC, USA; 49th Venice Biennale, Korean Pavilion, Italy; Sensory Meridian, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Michael Joo, Conserving Momentum (Egg/Gyro/Laundry Room), White Cube London, UK; Michael Joo: Drift, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA; Michael Joo: Drift (Bronx), The Bronx Museum of Arts, New York, NY, USA; Michael Joo, Doppelganger, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, UK; and Michael Joo Retrospective, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, CA, USA.
Joo is a Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale University and teaches in the Columbia University MFA program. His work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Denver Art Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, among others.
Selected Works
Selected Works
This print by Michael Joo expresses various aspects of the process the artist engaged in to create a body of molded blown glass bags for his "Single Breath Transfer" series. Starting with found plastic and paper bags that he filled with a single breath, Joo made molds of the inflated bags, and then created the blown-glass sculptures from those molds. On this print, we see the glass sculpture superimposed over digital scans of lungs during exhalation, along with a histogram, or graphical display of data, mapping the transfer of breath. Like much of Joo’s work, the series examines methods of transmission and representation, and areas of meaning embedded within materials and processes.
