Michael Joo

Joo is a substantial monograph on the work of American/Korean artist Michael Joo surveying all his finished projects, as well as some preliminary work, since his graduation in 1991. Joo describes his art as "a complex network of non-hierarchic information" with several layers of meaning that trigger multiple associations, and the book includes his extended captions alongside each project. Michael Joo works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, animation and performance-based video art. His work frequently investigates themes centring around questions of identity, juxtaposing Eastern spiritualism with the Western way of understanding the world. Fascinated by the interaction between nature and its surroundings, Joo also has a profound interest in scientific processes. Thematically, his projects explore dualities such as linear and cyclical, physical and metaphysical, real and unreal, natural and unnatural, often using a visual language which combines highly complex geometric and structural patterns with 'real' objects – bodily fluids, eggs and mosquitoes – from nature.

Exploring how science, religion and the media shape consciousness, Michael Joo's artworks knit together the physical and the metaphysical. Matter and subject matter, energy and waste, the visible and that which cannot be seen--this is the stuff of Joo's sculptures. His densely layered works are accretions of meaning brought about by succinctly-handled conjunctions and disjunctions in a space. This publication is the first monograph on the artist and will feature the first compilation of his own writings.