New York
O.K. Harris
Korean sculptor Sook Jin Jo has been living in New York since 1988; she had her first solo show at O.K. Harris in 1990. In the more than 20 years that she has been working in America, she has produced outstanding sculptural assemblages, drawings, collages, photographs, performances, and site-specific installations. Her first public project, the recently completed Wishing Bells/To Protect and To Serve (2004–09), consists of 108 bronze bells—one for each of the 108 negative emotions recognized in Buddhist theology—hanging from an open steel grid situated in front of a detention center in downtown Los Angeles. Always searching for a language that does justice to her spiritual concerns, Jo treads the waters of modernity rather carefully, finding refuse on the street and reassembling it into remarkably evocative installations. Presence and absence—the inevitability of death—mean a great deal to her; her sensibility engages in constructions that build a world of spirits, with emptiness providing a formal aesthetic as well as philosophical insight. …see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
