Sook Jin Jo: Sacred Space, Reclaimed Material

 "Art Chapel IV, Honduras" poured concrete and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist

By DAVID JAGER December 3, 2024

Sook Jin Jo has built a career with sculpture constructed from salvaged material. More accurately, she makes sculptural installations from material gathered and then returned to their site of origin. With an uncanny knack for finding intrigue in found objects, her assemblages renew both her materials and her environments. In her many sculptures, installations and site-specific works-often renovating derelict spaces- she shows that creation does not entail making something new. Instead it reconfigures existing things, giving them new life through a new context.   

To this end Sook Jin Jo has never worked with raw materials, except in her conte crayon and charcoal drawings. Otherwise she uses anything that comes to hand: discarded branches, old panelling, driftwood, cardboard, plastic, cloth.  She brings these things together in sculptural installations that are theatrically forceful in their impact.When not focusing on pure aesthetics she can be playful and uplifting, taking discarded construction and industrial artifacts and remodelling them into children’s playgrounds.

Like many artists who work in assemblage, Sook Jin Jo is a master of re-framing. Her use of abject material recalls the similar work of Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis, except that her intense sense of calligraphic line also strongly recalls the painting of Brice Marden. Her sense of space is impecable, her sense of line is calligraphic. As she works primarily in sculpture, her work is more physically felt, rooted in the body’s response to space and its reactivity to form.

                                "Resurection II" Reclaimed Wood. 1996 Courtesy of the artist

Sook Jin Jo creates through receptivity, in other words, through an extraordinary sensitivity to negative space as well as anomalies of color, texture, shape and form. She has distilled an immersive and meditative visual language that unites her disparate objects seamlessly. This is pared with a mysterious ability for finding the expressionistic qualities within her found materials captivates viewers. Her works often have a dynamic energy that radiates forcefully from the whole.

She has been refining and building this visual language painstakingly, performatively, over many decades. Beginning with her arrival in New York City in 1988, she has since created fifty site specific installations and been the subject of 40 solo exhibitions internationally. “All Things Work Together” held at O.K. Harris Works of Art in collaboration with gallery goers, was an extension of this concept into interactivity and performativity. So was ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ at Black And White Gallery in Brooklyn, was similarly an abstracted forest of salvaged wood that resembled a three-dimensional Calligraphic drawing. After a two month residency in Brazil, she worked with the students at Joao Ubaldo Ribero school in Itaparica, constructing a mural with local students that consisted of discarded wood scraps.

She is also known for her wooden towers made from salvaged sticks or tree trunks, totemic in their presence, placed in forest or in galleries of museums, halfway between the natural architecture of a tree and rudimentary human dwelling. You could almost call them shrines. 

The contemplative aura surrounding Sook Jin Jo’s work necessitates a discussion of the spiritual aspects of her work, which have been noted often. The eastern spiritual traditions of Sook Jin Jo’s native South Korea, Zen Buddhism and Taoism being the most prominent, are known for prioritizing negative space in their aesthetics and thinking. Zen teaches that it is better to attune to the neutral silence and space that surrounds sense impressions and unruly emotions, stilling the body until it overcomes its sense of restless drama. The contemplative stillness of her work combined with its sensitivity to surface and arrangement belie this understanding.  

Sook Jin Jo has also adopted Christianity, however. It is another powerful driver of South Korean culture, rooted in the drama of individual redemption and the resurrection of the human body. Her work thus creates an interesting tension between two spiritual traditions and cultures. Her sense of space and placement are deeply Eastern, while her use of discarded material echoes the Christian notion of charity, resurrection and redemption. There is a sense in her work of a space and materials that have been in a sense redeemed, or transformed into a better, more serene version of their former selves.  

Indeed, Sook Jin Jo’s ability to revive material is legendary. Old boards and shutters become painterly. Sea weathered plastic takes on the quality of a beach pebble. Aesthetic redemption abounds. However, without her finely attuned Wabi Sabi sense, this material redemption would fail. Her reorganization of discarded solar turbines from a Brooklyn rooftop, for example, transformed the museum floor into a virtual Zen garden, with the rusted metal scrap standing in for blossoms, much in the way the raked gravel at Ryon-Ji Temple stands in for rippling water. It is entirely owing to their placement. 

" Zen Garden" 1998 Solar Turbines and Window Frames. courtesy the Artist

This unambiguously spiritual character of Sook Jin Jo’s work has naturally led to several collaborations with places of worship. She has continuously been asked to create works for sacred spaces, or rooms for meditation. She has worked most recently with Christian missions worldwide, building a new type of spiritual space she calls an ‘art chapel’. They are open in feel while preserving a profoundly mediative outlook. Sequestered usually in a separate structure or a specially constructed corner of a building, they are distinct from the outset. One of her first chapels was a converted brick storage shed, which she transformed into a place of quiet introspection. It consisted of almost thirty salvaged chairs, all of them bereft of legs. They are massed together, towards the front, like an invisible and expectant congregation. 

Another wall piece made from discarded pieces of wood formed the negative impression of a cross - while yet another uses slits in steel shutters to project a cross of sunlight on the wall during certain hours of the day. The cross appears, but less as symbol and more as natural phenomena, referring back once again to her Buddhist roots.

Sook Jin Jo’s novel approach to sacred space, the way in which she artfully fuses two seemingly opposite spiritual sensibilities, have led to few mild misunderstandings. A recent chapel, which featured a lone high circular window and a hanging mobile of salvaged debris, drew whispered accusations of appearing ‘shamanistic’.  She takes this all in good natured stride, seeing her vocation as educational. “I intend to raise their understanding of art” she says with a very patient smile. “Many times they are simply unfamiliar with what it is.”

In other instances her installations can become pointedly political. This was case with her seaside installation at Gulupdo Island. A popular hiking destination and nature reserve that can be found in Incheon, South Korea, it is called Galapagos of South Korea. It is part of the Korean archipelago, but due to local tide patterns and the prevalence of Chinese pollution, it is also prone to large amounts of Chinese garbage washed up on its pristine tropical shores. 

        "Color of Life" trash, steel. 2024 Courtesy the artist 

Sook Jin Jo’s site-specific intervention was to do what she always does. She collected the detritus and found a way to meaningfully reconfigure it. Working long hours with a team in the humid heat, she collected hundreds of pieces of flotsam, plastic buoys, and other detritus and had them placed in a large steel cage directly on the shore, over a period of over ten days. In theory, her proposed piece sounds dubious. In practice, however, and owing to her incredibly keen eye, the piece proved to be bright and childlike, nearly recalling a children’s playground or a hamper full of toys.

The piece also marks a victory against South Korean developpers, who long vowed to develop a luxury golf course that would have disrupted its beloved natural features. A protest movement led by architect Kim Won was started and the developpers withdrew their proposal. The sculpture marks a moment of triumph over heedless development and trash. 

Sook Jin Jo’s most recent endeavor is an art chapel in Honduras- Art Chapel IV- is nearly finished. Returning to her earlier practice of creating a forest with salvaged trunks, it lends the cool feel of a forest to the space, with sawn stumps interspersed as seating. There is a cross once again, but this time as the almost accidental conjunction of a narrow vertical window and a horizontal indentation set into the concrete near the top. Once again, she is proposing the cross not merely as symbol but as a window onto the surrounding world. Just as her work invites the contemplative opening of the senses onto the ever present mysteries of form and space. WM