Sook Jin Jo: The Limits of Art, the Limits of Life
As one of Korea’s most interesting artists, Sook Jin Jo has fashioned a career that offers people many different kinds of art: sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, and public works. Intent on working at the interstices of categories, where sculptures subtly merge with installations, or drawings document performances, Jo has shown us it is still possible to find creative niches that feel both traditional and contemporary. Jo’s sculptures, perhaps the most prominent of her media, depend upon found materials usually wood or furniture taken from the streets early in the day, before being picked up by refuse collectors. Her dependence on the random appearance of appropriate materials gives her art a magical feeling; it is as if the lives of those who lived previously with the wood had somehow become present in the resonance of the objects found by the artist. Jo, whose art is characterized by presence and absence at the same time, employs used materials because their scarred surfaces suggest life before their use as art. But it Is also true that she is suggesting a world beyond that which we inhabit a world that inevitably reminds us of our own death. By combining presence and absence, Jo clearly seeks the expression not of religious dogma so much as the spiritual awareness of the life events responsible for such doctrines.
It happens, then, that the spiritual life Jo posits seen, for example, in 'Color of Life', a 1999 performance at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where participants in open, stacked barrels considered their own death involves the close study of mortality. Yet Jo, who is sharply cognizant of the limits of her life and those of others, documents her recognitions as filled with a belief that may best be described as holy. The unconventional nature of her attitude, what we might call a concerted meeting with death, results in insights that take on a deep seriousness without becoming somber or morbid. This is, given Jo’s choice of subject, exceedingly hard to do, and one of the genuine pleasures of her art is seeing her work as catholic and ecumenical in other words, free of rigid doctrine in the face of death’s awareness. Some of Jo’s most successful pieces have to do with meditation spaces in the woods, where someone can contemplate basic ideas and feeling within the solace of nature. In one instance, a meditation space built in the year 2000 in upstate New York, her arrangement of four open walls of branches do not protect the participant from the vicissitudes of the weather; instead, it suggests that nature can offset but not do away with the primal questions of our existence. In Jo’s setting, meaningfulness derives from our contemplation of such questions, even as we know that we cannot transform the limitations of life.
Jo’s emotional depth, faced with the psychic complications of impermanence, infuses all of her art with a seriousness of purpose. This does not mean that she is hopelessly grim and lacks humor; indeed, one of the pleasures of knowing her is that she possesses a humorous candor that lightens her essentially earnest nature. For me, Jo is a sculptor first and foremost, and we must remember that sculpture’s original function was to furnish a memorial for the dead. All there markable developments in this field cannot take away sculpture’s primary purpose, the memento mori. In a magical way, Jo seeks to translate the particulars of memory into a profound, worldwide understanding of its space asa center for the healing of loss. She knows that loss is central to everyone’s experience of life, but she also proposes that art can both sanction and ameliorate its experience in terms that reflect a positive, indeed a nearly sanctified transformation of mind. She sees the Big Picture, then, but she does not allow it to dominate her lively, finely honed imagination. Part of her truth stems, as we have seen above, from her inspired use of materials, but there is also the presence of the spirit animating these materials in spiritual ways.
How else does the spiritual manifest itself in Jo’s work? Well, for one, she has worked with poor school children in Bahia, Brazil, close to a studio where shehad a residency fellowship to make art. Jo and the students decorated an outside wall of the school together, in a common effort that expressed itself as much as a performance as the group’s production of art. This small project became a statement of pride and ignited the children’s interest in art; such communal activities reflect Jo’s concern with the world beyond the sometimes close confines of the art scene, where posturing and vanity can get in the way of making good work. Indeed, on a profound level, the project shows us the depth of Jo’s commitment to an esthetic that relies on shared materials and effort, which lend an ambient energy to the combined work and its realization. Her point Is not only to create, but also to help young people understand the potential of their own creativity, which animates absence or emptiness. Something is done to work out a strategy ennobling our limited lives, whose purpose remains beyond our comprehension. Art can lend dignity to anyone’s circumstances, no matter how straitened they may be.
We can see Jo’s determination in a public work completed in 2009, entitled, 'Wishing Bells: To Protect and To Serve', done in an outside site in Los Angeles, next to the newly built detention center for the Los Angeles police. Here, Jo, who despite her Korean background has been careful to address her audience in non-Asian terms, uses a Buddhist approach to her project. For the outdoor installation, cedar columns were introduced as supports for a metal matrix from which 108 bronze bells are hung; the number of bells corresponds to the number of desires recognized in Buddhist thought. Hanging from each bell’s clapper is a positive tag, marked with words such as “Kindness” and meant to offer hope to those who pass through the installation. For Jo, the point of the project has been to extend solace in situations where it is badly needed. The native decency of Jo’s sensibility may be read as part of her creativity in general, in which a sense of conviction is mirrored by an original intention. In fact, Jo is uncommon in that her intentions become as important as her expressiveness. But then this is part of her general directness of purpose.
'To The Unknown God(2007)', perhaps Jo’s most original installation to date, consists of beams, branches, and trunks of wood arranged seemingly haphazardly across a wide expanse. The work is too crowded with material for the audience to walk through; it is much like a crowded thicket from which individual pieces of wood rise, as if to acknowledge the unknown god above. An extraordinary piece of work, 'To The Unknown God' shows us that Jo is capable of making a spiritual statement in purely existential terms, in the sense that hope and loss hang in the balance of what none of us know. Far from discouraging us, the installation’s bleakness turns back on itself, and in doing so deliberately accommodates wonder and, for the thoughtful viewer, even awe in the face of the unknown. In some ways, Jo remains outside the pale of contemporary art, with its insistence on theory, politics, and lack of skill (as a rejoinder to the market’s extreme commercialism). Instead, she does what spiritual artists have always done: present a glimpse of what lies on the other side of our perception. Her work is intelligent, sensuous, and focused, informing us of our possibilities, as well as her own.
Jonathan Goodman. art critic
