Michael Joo
Anton Kern Gallery, New York, USA
The centrepiece of Michael Joo’s exhibition was a translucent, life-sized Buddha which sat beneath a pipal tree, as if each moment was bringing him nearer his labrum of supreme enlightenment. It faced a majestic rack of spreading Elk antlers displayed like a winged alter to the mysteries of sexual potency. Joo’s obsessions are revealed in the subjects that reverberated between these two sculptures: religion, history, sex and death. Over the past six years he has vigilantly traced their complex origins, all the while purling an iconography of his own elaborate design.
The originating nucleus of Joo’s iconography is worth a brief account in order to avoid careening down the crooked path of sputtering interpretations. History de-rails the Western assumption that the global influence of Buddhism first stemmed from China and Japan the Three Kingdoms period in Korea marks the original passage of Buddhism from Korea to Japan, rather than the other way round. In the year 538 Korean monks first arrived in Japan, and following a further appeal from Japanese rulers, a second envoy of Buddhist monks, nuns, architects, and sculptors travelled to Japan to spread Buddhist culture. Joo’s Buddha is a particular one Korean. As he said in a recent interview: ‘In the past, some of the work has evoked that idea of having a Pan Asian identity, although I have a diminishing interest in Pan Asian as a label or concept.’ Don’t we all. Such labels have become the products of ham-fisted tactics for pulverising individuality into formless generalisations beneath the colours of inclusivity.
Joo has gone a great distance towards unpacking unique, exacting, individual meanings in his art, which he carries off with a taut, twisting irony. His Korean Buddha is diaphanous, which causes the human being to shimmer before us, his flesh and bone glistening beneath the skin of the sculpture. Joo has metaphorically uncovered the corporeality of the man called Buddha from beneath the cultural mock-up that has subsumed Buddha’s original identity over the centuries and this is where his irony sings. He has made his individuality transparent in order to sacrifice it to a universalising form of the cultural artefact. This headless sculptural fragment signals absence: the loss of enlighten-ment’s true source, the obliteration of spirituality, of grace and finally of individuality.
Joo’s riddle spins into another sculptural ensemble within this exhibition. In Mistaken (I Must Be) (1999) a scrap of arm taken from a resuscitation dummy pierces two sides of a slim glass vitrine. Centred within the glass box and above the most tender part of the arm, an Asian Tiger Mosquito variously described as an ‘opportunistic feeder’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘an efficient transmitter of disease’ is posed, ready to gorge. Here Joo stages a pathetic mise en scène of pseudo-subterfuge: contamination carried out in the name of sustenance. Joo deftly pictures the ‘death of effect’ where the loss of individuality hastens the loss of efficacy on both sides of the stinger.
Throughout this exhibition, Joo successfully evades the trailing efficacy that is multiculturalism’s swathe. His manoeuvre may be representative of the very few artists who have led the emancipation from the debilitating culture wars which raged as their careers emerged. Indeed, he and others are calling upon something much more radical than the original framers of cultural inclusion could have ever imagined.
Ronald Jones
