Venue : Kukje Gallery

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce Single Breath Transfer, a solo exhibition of new work by Michael Joo on view from November 30 to December 31, 2017. This is the artist’s first solo show at Kukje Gallery and his first major exhibition in Korea in almost ten years. The comprehensive exhibition will be installed in both the K2 and K3 galleries and consists of discrete but interrelated bodies of work that explore important areas of research that have occupied the artist for many years.

Single Breath Transfer is a title that alludes specifically to Joo’s interest in how all materials are in a state of constant change. In medicine, a “single breath transfer” is a test done to gauge the ability of the lungs to exchange gases from the atmosphere to the blood stream. This everyday transfer of energy becomes an analogy for nature at work, illustrating a basic law of physics. For Joo, observing this ontological phenomenon is a fundamental part of his practice, framing broader questions about time and culture and how systems of meaning are in constant flux. This is particularly evident in Joo’s multimedia works that relate to the body, energy, and the question of what brings life to things, whether visible or invisible.

Michael Joo’s curiosity and intellectual precision has pushed the boundaries of visual art for more than three decades, returning again and again to research, process, and documentation as mainstays of his practice. Utilizing cross-disciplinary methods that combine art and science, Joo’s work balances complex vocabularies of religion and psychology with the physical sciences of biology and geology, layering observation and material to ask important questions about contemporary social values and how we define the world in which we live.

MICHAEL JOO (b. 1966, Ithaca, New York) received his MFA from the Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, in 1991, and his BFA from Washington University, St Louis, in 1989. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Joo has held solo shows at numerous institutions including Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia (2016), Freer|Sackler, part of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2016), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2014), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2014), Rodin Gallery, Seoul (2006), and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida (2004). Joo exhibited at the Korean Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale together with Do Ho Suh (2001). Selected group exhibitions include: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015), Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015), 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), Haunch of Venison, Berlin – a two-person show with Damien Hirst (2010), MoMA PS1, New York (2008), 6th Gwangju Biennale (2006), Serpentine Gallery, London (1994, 2005), and Whitney Biennial, New York (2000). Joo’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Moderna Museet, M+, MIT List Visual Arts Center, UCLA Hammer Museum, among others.

 

+https://www.kukjegallery.com/KJ_exhibitions_view_1.php?page=upcoming&ex_no=206&v=1