Michael Joo was born into a Korean family in 1966 Ithaca, New York. Joo's parents immigrated from South Korea in order to seek graduate studies at Cornell University. He lived in a small community that focused on academics. Joo grew up between New York state and Minnesota. By influence of his late father, Joo grew up “half in the lab and half on the ranch” as his father was a cattleman who studied animal breeding and his mother being in seed science. Joo studied Biology at Wesleyan University but felt disconnected with the subject. He practiced art in parallel while continuing his studies.
Eventually Joo lived and worked in Vienna, Austria, at a company that specialized in seed science. He often spent his time at the Secession exhibition hall, influenced by his artistic experience in Vienna. Joo graduated with a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1989, and he later received his MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1991.
Joo’s artworks investigate concepts of identity and knowledge in a hybrid, contemporary world. Joo’s artworks often blend and collide seemingly disparate elements such as science and religion, fact versus fiction, and high and low culture. Human intervention in nature and the forms generated by these intersections is a recurring backdrop for his work. Using a range of materials and media, and with an emphasis on process, Joo juxtaposes humanity’s various states of knowledge and culture, addressing the fluid nature of identity itself, and prompting us to question how and why we perceive the world as we do. In performance/video works, he has swum through a ton of MSG, waited in the wild for elk to lick salt off of his body, and walked against the flow of crude oil along the Trans Alaskan Pipeline. Numerous art museums house Michael Joo's artwork in their permanent collections. These include Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Walker Art Center, LACMA, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art and Moderna Museet.

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