Michael Joo (Yale MFA 1991) in conversation with David K. Thompson, Coordinator of Cataloguing, Yale Center for British Art
Born in 1966, Joo is a contemporary artist who works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting. He is a Senior Critic in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. Joo’s early studies in biology at Wesleyan University and his experience working at a seed science company in Europe inform his art practice, which often touches upon cultural heritage, identity, and natural history. His work blends elements such as science and religion, fact and fiction, and high and low culture. Human intervention in nature, and the forms generated by these junctions, recur in his work. In 2009, Joo created three sculptures inspired by George Stubbs’s Zebra (1763) in the YCBA collection: Stubbs (Absorbed), Doppelganger (Pink Rocinante), and Consistent-Seen-Touched. These works exemplify Joo’s interest in the natural world and the tensions and harmonies that exist between science and nature. Joo is also a performance and video artist and has cooperated with local children to create a monument in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, walked against the flow of crude oil along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and waited in the wild for elk to lick salt off his body. He is currently working on a long-term collaborative project between New York and Hawaii.
Joo has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Samsung Foundation for Art and Culture in Seoul. In 2001, he represented South Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale. His work is in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Joo lives and works in New York City.
This program is presented through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.