Michael Joo reflects on career at Space ZeroOne after sculpture collapse

On a quiet, cloudy afternoon in Tribeca recently, artist Michael Cho and I squatted next to a tower of aluminum griddles. The towers cover the entire area of ​​Hanwha Cultural Foundation’s new institutional initiative Space ZeroOne. Otherwise, the gallery was empty. Zhu moved slowly between the rows of pallets, occasionally bending to peek at one or pointing at the glass walls between the pallets that turned the tower into a makeshift vitrine, all the while remembering where he found VHS tapes, Kara Walker paintings, fragments of petrified wood, and other ephemeral objects.

Viewed from the other side of the room, the installation looks architectural. Up close, it looks more like a drawer in the archive that Joo has been building for decades. “These are the baking sheets from 100 years of New York cooking,” Joo said, running his hand gently along the edges of the baking sheets. “They’re all utilized. They’re all feeding countless people.”

Pallets form the backbone series connectionthe centerpiece of Joo’s exhibition “Sweat Models 1991-2026.” The show, which opens on February 20, looks back at work he began in the early 1990s, when he arrived in New York from graduate school, where he studied biology and briefly worked in plant genetics.

“I’m really worried about the show becoming too… nostalgic,” Joe said. “But hopefully there’s something embedded in all physical intelligence as well. All the experiments you do in the studio, they start in your head, but they also become a part of you.”

This exhibition easily feels like coming home: Joo is as New York as an artist can get. He looked exactly like that when we met, dressed in black with multiple zippers and no-nonsense boots, his thick gray hair framing a soft, thoughtful voice.

However, just days before my walkthrough, the exhibit attracted attention for an entirely different reason. During the opening reception, a building named great salty taste (1992) – Several pillars built from compressed salt blocks – reportedly collapsed after being knocked over by a tourist. The blocks were scattered across the gallery floor and four attendees suffered minor injuries.

Zhu calmly recounted the accident with disappointment in his eyes. “I hate it when people interact with the work in this way, it’s tragic. It’s traumatic. That piece has been shown in private galleries and institutional exhibitions and has been there for forty years,” he said. “It’s definitely something that needs to be paused and something that I need to think about deeply.”

Still, the job will be rebuilt. The salt blocks used in the sculpture are salt blocks commonly sold as mineral supplements for livestock. Replacing them is simple. This gives Joo reason, like many of the works in this exhibition, to think about where he comes from.

“My father was a cattle rancher,” he said. “I had to go back to my roots and, you know, a lot of the material here probably has strong ties to my past.”

Some of the ideas behind the exhibition date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, before Joo held commercial exhibitions. series connection Originated from the White Column Committee. At the time, Zhu’s girlfriend was involved in AIDS research at Harlem Hospital, which allowed him to examine anonymous medical records.

“I had a ton of hospital information,” he recalls, which at the time were long dot matrix printouts listing statistics on admissions, diagnoses and deaths. “It’s all numbers. But it represents a lot of human lives.” Initially, the installation consisted of printouts and pallets, but eventually evolved around other materials Joo had collected over the years.

“This is not really an archive,” Zhu said as we looked at fossils collected during our expedition to the Middle East. “It’s more of a cross-referenced system.”

In the middle of the conversation, the gallery door opened and another artist entered. Adrian Villar Rojas, an Argentinian sculptor known for his large-scale installations and speculative environments, came to see the exhibition. The two artists have known each other for years, since Villar Rojas visited Joo’s studio early in his career.

“To me, he was this character,” Villar Rojas recalled. “When things were happening really fast for me… he was very generous and open.”

Joo once gave Villar Rojas a graphic novel watchman Author: Alan Moore. Villar Rojas later responded AionHéctor Germán Oesterheld’s Argentinian science fiction epic. A few years ago, Joo invited Villar Rojas to travel with him to the United Arab Emirates on a research trip related to a site-specific project. The pair spent several days walking among fossil beds with a conservation scientist, exploring what was once the ancient seafloor.

“These are actually ocean bottoms that feel like they’ve just been flipped over,” Joe said.

The heat is unbearable. By midday, temperatures climbed to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing teams to start work before sunrise or hide under buildings for a few minutes out of the sun. But this kind of investigation, physical research, has always been part of Joo’s practice. He believes this instinct may come from the earliest influences.

Zhu’s mother, a North Korean-born agricultural scientist, fled south by hiding on the roof of a train as it passed rows of Russian soldiers during the Korean War. Years later, she returned to North Korea, became involved in humanitarian efforts to combat famine, and eventually started an NGO with Joo’s father to bring goats and bags of seeds to the country. She founded the first agricultural department at Pyongyang University.

“The way I grew up was about space and land,” Joe said. “What does land mean? What does it mean simultaneously geopolitically and spiritually?” Looking around the installation, the lineage becomes clear: salt blocks, fossils and pallets.

“Well, that’s always been you,” Villar Rojas said, “you’ve always been the collector, the gatherer. I remember the first time I came to your studio a few years ago, the fossil collection, the rock collection…”

“I’m glad you mentioned that,” Zhu said before revealing the project that will take him back to the Venice Biennale later this year – more than two decades after representing South Korea in the national pavilion. He was unable to discuss the work, which will be on display in the main exhibition, but did touch on his relationship with Koyo Kouoh, the curator of this year’s main exhibition at the Biennale, who died unexpectedly last year. The two had lengthy conversations and collaborated in 2014 for EVA International. “Then, about two years ago, she contacted me and said ‘I have some things to do…please keep your schedule.'” In a way, we’re still working together. ”

“I think it speaks very well to the agency of living and non-living things,” said Villar Rojas. “That’s part of your job, right? Sadly, the curator passed away, which is a huge loss to the art world, but Koyo’s agency as a curator continues now. It’s so, so powerful.”

Joo expected to rebuild great salty taste It will pass quickly, and it does. The gallery, which closed after the work was destroyed, reopened last week.

Just before I left, Joe walked me over to where the fallen sculpture was.

“I think it’s going to have a retrospective feel to it,” he said. “But that’s not the case. Maybe it’s just a different kind of accumulation that feels more generative than looking back. It’s like time travel. Moving backward to move forward.”