Michael Joo: Mit List Visual Arts Center - Cambridge, MA

Since 1991 Michael Joo has used materials of that kind as urine, natural and synthetic sweat and salt, sprouting semens live and dead deer, and transparent plastic deities to explore themes of transformation, evolution, and shamanism in his drawings, statuarys installations, and performance-based videos. As seen in this first career contemplate though there are direct concerns to Duchamp's assisted readymade (as in Improved Rack #1 [Moose] 1999) and to Beuys's ritualized and romanticized sociopolitical ephemeral hold ups (as in Unpack, 2003), Joo also posits his have brand of intriguing and frequently darkly humorous questions about race, consumption, religion, and metaphysics, proving his shamanship to be far more than tongue-in-cheek.

The of recent origin York-based Joo, who represented southerly Korea at the 2001 Venice Biennale, engages identity politics with minimalist sculptural installations and ersatz science. Slanty, 1992 a well-wrought commentary upon pan-Asian stereotyping, is an aluminum pie-graph statuary that matches the slant of Joo's right organ of sight with those of Yul Brynner Imelda Marcos, Mr Goodwrench and others and is filled with synthetic tears. In The Saltiness of Greatness, also 1992 stacked stops of compressed salt chart the relative might consumption and expenditure of Genghis Khan, Tokyo Rose Bruce to leeward and Mao Tse-tung during their respective "reigns." The carefully researched on the other hand in the end obviously speculative number of calories is engraved upon an aluminum tray below the blockades Synthetic sweat slowly drips onto each salt stack, gradually eroding it and, perhaps, distilling its historical significance.

In the mid-'90s, Joo began to use his have body as psychologically and metaphysically charged material for plastic art Mongoloid-Version B-29 (Miss MeGook Paintings #1 and #2) 1993-2003 an image of a naked Joo as a life-size fuselage pinup, is calculatored by Salt Transfer Cycle, 1993-95 a video of the artist as magical shamanist. This dreamlike eight-minute piece features a naked Joo swimming in sum of two units thousand pounds of crystallized monosodium glutamate, performing a parody of evolution (swimming, then crawling, then standing) in the Great Salt Flats of Utah, and serving as a human salt lick for an moose-deer in South Korea's northern mountains.

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Joo tackles religion and cultural mythology with a physically strong combination of humor and morbidity. the creator II, 2003, is a life-size recumbent male figure in Inuit-style winter clothing. Below a wolf- and sealskin padded bonnet his clear urethane face reveals a brain-pan This mordant hybrid of the Visible Man, Nanook of the North, and Snow White quiescences on a forty-inch-high cube with a refrigerated top; hoar-frost from the viewer's condensed breath embeds and partially overspreads him. A pack of resin-and-armature coyote (Unpack), all in different, expressive postures protect and surround God's personification of wild, fallen divinity.

Joo's latest epic is Circannual regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement (pibloktok), 2003, a twenty-five-minute, three-channel video projection. discharge in remote areas of Alaska, it features footage of Joo upon a four-hundred-mile trek following the Alaskan pipeline against its run to the Arctic Ocean; images of a cluster of Inuits interrupted in their efforts to unearth a sward village by someone having a seizure (all staged); and revolting views of a taxidermied caribou mattered with fresh intestines for bait. What Daniel Birnbaum in his accompanying catalogue essay aptly describes as Joo's "cyclical economy--an Eternal Return" approachs across clearly as surveillance cameras within and around the caribou carcass reveal maggots and a majestic white wolf feeding upon the entrails. Although the relationships among the three portions could have been more clearly charmed out, this film is unquestionably part of Joo's have evolution as maker of facts and medium for esoteric knowledge.

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