It’s not often that you hear New York – the so called city that never sleeps - praised for having a sense of isolated, desolate, calm, but In Redhook, ‘a little bump sticking out of Brooklyn where you can see Manhattan to the north and the Statue of Liberty to the south’, as artist Michael Joo describes it, he has found just that. 

‘Redhook is cut off from the rest of New York by the Subway so it’s always had a kind of land that time forgot feel and historically it’s always had a kind of rough reputation’, he explains. Not that its artistic community isn’t as thriving as in the borough’s more obvious creative haunts such as Williamsburg. 'I think for a long time artists have been attracted to Redhook and we see each other around – at lunch and stuff’, he tells us over the phone to our London office, on a bleak grey day, from his studio in this eerie urban outpost.

‘I like to be off the grid, off the main land’, he continues. ‘The water’s always kind of encroaching here and things seem a little bit unfixed – there’s a visceral quality to it’. In a way, he considers, this peripheral part of the city is ‘a bit like Alaska’, where it’s ‘part of the US, but geographically and culturally somewhere else. Places that are like space stations in that way really interest me’. 

With his family hailing from South Korea, and having grown up in the Southern United States, Joo says that ‘the idea of space and separation has always been a pressing idea to me’. Similar to the solace he finds in the satellite feeling Redhook has to the rest of New York, a sense of duality in Seoul holds much appeal for the artist. ‘I like the simultaneous speed and buzz of the city and people’s strong imperative to move into the future, with people’s sense of family and tradition’, he explains. ‘They have a solid foothold in humanness'. 

Indeed, duality is also key to Joo’s work, which can be seen in London at The Wallace Space’s Glasstress show until 23rd February. One of his most memorable works, 1993’s Salt Transfer Cycle, a three stage conceptual piece that took him from downtown NYC to the South Korean mountains via the salt flats of Utah, was born out of the desire to ‘take an idea from the studio and will it into being. To take this thing a little further and get it into nature’. The process began with Joo ‘swimming through 2000lb of MSG in a studio in Chinatown’, followed by ingesting salt at in Utah, ‘where thy would race cars, a very linear pursuit’, before heading to South Korea to wait for roaming elks to lick off ‘the salt on my body, which crystallised to this white coating’. The result juxtaposed ‘the idea generated in the studio, so a very artificial environment’, with ‘the reality of salt in bloodstreams'. 

Elsewhere more recent works explore similar parallels. In a sculpture piece, Family Standing on a Bridge Looking into the Future Pissing, we see a group of figures, the family, ‘a man, a woman and two children’, who are each doing something ‘biologically different’. So, ‘they’re grouped together on one level but they’re absorbed in individual emotional acts – they’re two things at once’. 

Joo describes his education as multi-disciplinary, something we suggest could go to explain the technical and creative threads that intertwine in his work. ‘I find a lot of artists come from scientific backgrounds, but I also don’t find too much of a difference in them’, he considers. ‘There’s a certain similarity in how both fields pursue the abstract, to zone in on something and kind of see the stone beneath the one you’re upturning’. 

It’s the ideas and sense of enquiry from his grad students, and other artists hidden in his reserved community, that inspire him the most, then. ‘It’s exciting to see people pursuing things outside of the gallery, and without thinking about structure’.