On a recent quiet, cloudy afternoon in Tribeca, artist Michael Joo and I crouched beside a tower of aluminum baking trays. The towers covered a whole section of Space ZeroOne, the Hanwha Foundation of Culture’s new institutional initiative. The gallery was otherwise empty. Joo moved slowly between the columns of trays, occasionally bending down to peer into one, or pointing to the glass walls between stacks that turned the towers into makeshift vitrines, remembering where he had picked up the VHS tapes, the Kara Walker drawings, and the bits of fossilized wood, among other ephemera.
From across the room, the installation looks architectural. Up close, it’s more like drawers in an archive that Joo has been building for decades. “These are baking trays from 100 years of New York cooking,” Joo said, running a hand lightly along one rim. “All of them were used. All of them have fed countless people.”
The trays form the backbone of Concatenations, the central work in Joo’s exhibition “Sweat Models 1991–2026.” The show, which opened February 20, revisits work he began making in the early 1990s, shortly after arriving in New York from graduate school, where he had studied biology and briefly worked in plant genetics.
“I was really concerned about this show becoming too … nostalgic” Joo said. “But hopefully there’s something embedded in all the material intelligence too. All the experiments that you’re working through in the studio, they begin in your head but they get to be very much a part of you as well.”
The exhibition could easily have felt like a homecoming: Joo is as New York as an artist can get. When we met, he looked the part, dressed in black, with multiple zippers, serious boots, and thick graying hair framing a soft, thoughtful voice.
However, just days before my walkthrough, the exhibition had drawn attention for an entirely different reason. During the opening reception, a sculpture titled Saltiness of Greatness (1992)—several columns built from compressed blocks of salt—collapsed after a visitor reportedly knocked into it. The blocks scattered across the gallery floor, and four attendees were left with minor injuries.
Joo spoke about the accident calmly, with disappointment in his eyes. “I hate that people interacted with the work that way, it’s tragic. It’s traumatic. That work had been in private galleries and institutional shows, and it hasn’t fallen in forty years,” he said. “It definitely was something that demanded pause, and that I needed to consider deeply.”
Still, the work is going to be rebuilt. The salt blocks used in the sculpture are the kind commonly sold as mineral supplements for livestock. Replacing them is straightforward. And it gives Joo a reason to, like many of the works in this show, consider where he came from.
“My father was a cattleman,” he said. “I just have to go back to the roots, you know, probably a lot of the materials here have a strong connection with my past.”
Michael Joo, Saltiness of Greatness, 1992. Private Collection. Photo: Tim Lloyd
Some of the ideas behind the exhibition date to the late 1980s and early ’90s, before Joo had ever had a commercial show. Concatenations has its beginnings in a White Columns commission. At the time, Joo’s girlfriend was involved in AIDS research at Harlem Hospital, which allowed him to examine anonymized medical records.
“I had these reams and reams of hospital information,” he said, recalling that at the time such files were long dot-matrix printouts of statistics listing admissions, diagnoses, and deaths. “It was all numbers. But it represented so many lives.” Originally, the installation consisted of the printouts and the trays, but eventually grew around other materials Joo had been collecting for years.
“It’s not really an archive,” Joo said, as we looked at fossils collected during a research trip in the Middle East. “It’s more like a cross-referenceable system.”
Partway through the conversation, the door of the gallery opened and another artist stepped inside. Adrian Villar Rojas, the Argentine sculptor known for large-scale installations and speculative environments, had come to see the exhibition. The two artists have known each other for years, ever since Villar Rojas visited Joo’s studio early in his own career.
“To me he became this figure,” Villar Rojas recalled. “When things were happening very fast for me… he was extremely generous and open.”
Joo once gave Villar Rojas a copy of the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore. Villar Rojas later returned the gesture with El Eternauta, the Argentine science-fiction epic by Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Years ago, Joo invited Villar Rojas to join him in the United Arab Emirates for a research trip tied to a site-specific project. The pair spent days walking fossil beds with a conservation scientist, exploring what had once been the floor of an ancient sea.
“These were literally sea floors that felt like they’d just been turned over,” Joo said.
The heat was punishing. Temperatures climbed to as much as 122 degrees Fahrenheit by midday, forcing the group to begin work before sunrise or hide under a building to escape the sun for just a few minutes. But that investigation, that physical research, has always been part of Joo’s practice. He believes the instinct may come from the earliest of influences.
Joo’s mother was an agricultural scientist born in North Korea who fled south during the Korean War by hiding on top of a train as it passed platoons of Russian soldiers. Years later, she returned to North Korea as part of humanitarian work addressing famine and, with Joo’s father, eventually started an NGO bringing goats and bags of seeds to the country. She started the first Agriculture Department at Pyongyang University.
Installation view from Michael Joo’s “Sweat Models 1991–2026″ at Space ZeroOne. Photo by Genevieve Hanson
“The way I grew up was about space and land,” Joo said. “What does land mean? What does it mean geopolitically and spiritually at the same time?” Looking around the installation, the lineage becomes visible: the salt blocks, the fossils, and the trays.
“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, years ago, the fossil collections, the rock collections…”
“I’m glad you mentioned that,” Joo 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 couldn’t discuss the work, which will be in the main exhibition, but did speak about his relationship with Koyo Kouoh, the curator of this year’s main exhibition at the Biennale who died unexpectedly last year. The two had a long-running dialogue and worked together for the EVA International in 2014. “Then, about two years ago she contacted me and said ‘I’ve got something coming up…keep your schedule open.’ In a way we are still working together.”
“I think it speaks beautifully about the agency of the living and non-living,” Villar Rojas said, “which is also very part of your work, right? Sadly this curator passed away, it was a huge loss for the art world, but Koyo’s agency as a curator continues now. It’s so, so powerful.”
Joo expected rebuilding Saltiness of Greatness would go quickly, and it has. The gallery, which closed after the work crumbled, reopened last week.
Just before I left, Joo walked me over to where the fallen sculpture stood.
“I thought it would feel retrospective,” he said. “But it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just a different kind of accumulation, it feels more generative than retrospective. It’s like time travel. Moving backwards to move forwards.”
