{"id":1818853,"date":"2026-03-10T17:02:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T14:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1818853"},"modified":"2026-03-10T17:02:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T14:02:15","slug":"michael-joo-reflects-on-career-at-space-zeroone-after-sculpture-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1818853","title":{"rendered":"Michael Joo Reflects on Career at Space ZeroOne After Sculpture Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ZO_Joo-Install-05.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tOn 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom across the room, the installation looks architectural. Up close, it\u2019s more like drawers in an archive that Joo has been building for decades. \u201cThese are baking trays from 100 years of New York cooking,\u201d Joo said, running a hand lightly along one rim. \u201cAll of them were used. All of them have fed countless people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe trays form the backbone of Concatenations<\/em>, the central work in Joo\u2019s exhibition \u201cSweat Models 1991\u20132026.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was really concerned about this show becoming too \u2026 nostalgic\u201d Joo said. \u201cBut hopefully there\u2019s something embedded in all the material intelligence too. All the experiments that you\u2019re working through in the studio, they begin in your head but they get to be very much a part of you as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, 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<\/em> (1992)\u2014several columns built from compressed blocks of salt\u2014collapsed after a visitor reportedly knocked into it. The blocks scattered across the gallery floor, and four attendees were left with minor injuries.<\/p>\n

\n\tJoo spoke about the accident calmly, with disappointment in his eyes. \u201cI hate that people interacted with the work that way, it\u2019s tragic. It\u2019s traumatic. That work had been in private galleries and institutional shows, and it hasn\u2019t fallen in forty years,\u201d he said. \u201cIt definitely was something that demanded pause, and that I needed to consider deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy father was a cattleman,\u201d he said. \u201cI just have to go back to the roots, you know, probably a lot of the materials here have a strong connection with my past.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Michael Joo,\u00a0Saltiness of Greatness,\u00a0<\/em>1992.\u00a0Private Collection.\u00a0Photo: Tim Lloyd<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSome of the ideas behind the exhibition date to the late 1980s and early \u201990s, before Joo had ever had a commercial show. Concatenations<\/em> has its beginnings in a White Columns commission. At the time, Joo\u2019s girlfriend was involved in AIDS research at Harlem Hospital, which allowed him to examine anonymized medical records.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI had these reams and reams of hospital information,\u201d he said, recalling that at the time such files were long dot-matrix printouts of statistics listing admissions, diagnoses, and deaths. \u201cIt was all numbers. But it represented so many lives.\u201d Originally, the installation consisted of the printouts and the trays, but eventually grew around other materials Joo had been collecting for years.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s not really an archive,\u201d Joo said, as we looked at fossils collected during a research trip in the Middle East. \u201cIt\u2019s more like a cross-referenceable system.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPartway 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\u2019s studio early in his own career.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTo me he became this figure,\u201d Villar Rojas recalled. \u201cWhen things were happening very fast for me\u2026 he was extremely generous and open.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJoo once gave Villar Rojas a copy of the graphic novel Watchmen<\/em> by Alan Moore. Villar Rojas later returned the gesture with El Eternauta<\/em>, the Argentine science-fiction epic by H\u00e9ctor Germ\u00e1n 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese were literally sea floors that felt like they\u2019d just been turned over,\u201d Joo said.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s practice. He believes the instinct may come from the earliest of influences.<\/p>\n

\n\tJoo\u2019s 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\u2019s father, eventually started an NGO bringing goats and bags of seeds to the country. She started the first Agriculture Department at Pyongyang University.<\/p>\n

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Installation view from Michael Joo\u2019s \u201cSweat Models 1991\u20132026\u2033 at Space ZeroOne. Photo by Genevieve Hanson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cThe way I grew up was about space and land,\u201d Joo said. \u201cWhat does land mean? What does it mean geopolitically and spiritually at the same time?\u201d Looking around the installation, the lineage becomes visible: the salt blocks, the fossils, and the trays.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWell that\u2019s always been you,\u201d Villar Rojas said, \u201cyou\u2019ve always been the collector, the gatherer. I remember the first time I came to your studio, years ago, the fossil collections, the rock collections\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m glad you mentioned that,\u201d Joo said before revealing the project that will take him back to the Venice Biennale later this year\u2014more than two decades after representing South Korea in the national pavilion. He couldn\u2019t discuss the work, which will be in the main exhibition, but did speak about his relationship with Koyo Kouoh, the curator of this year\u2019s 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. \u201cThen, about two years ago she contacted me and said \u2018I\u2019ve got something coming up\u2026keep your schedule open.\u2019 In a way we are still working together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think it speaks beautifully about the agency of the living and non-living,\u201d Villar Rojas said, \u201cwhich is also very part of your work, right? Sadly this curator passed away, it was a huge loss for the art world, but Koyo\u2019s agency as a curator continues now. It\u2019s so, so powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJoo expected rebuilding Saltiness of Greatness<\/em> would go quickly, and it has. The gallery, which closed after the work crumbled, reopened last week.<\/p>\n

\n\tJust before I left, Joo walked me over to where the fallen sculpture stood.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI thought it would feel retrospective,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t. Maybe it\u2019s just a different kind of accumulation, it feels more generative than retrospective. It\u2019s like time travel. Moving backwards to move forwards.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ZO_Joo-Install-05.jpg?w=1024″] 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\u2019s new institutional initiative. The gallery was otherwise empty. Joo moved slowly between the columns of trays, occasionally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1818853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1818853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1818853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1818853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1818853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}