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Michael Joo has swum through 2,000 pounds of MSG.

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Michael Joo

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He's sat in the same spot for 10 days, letting wild elk lick syrup off his naked body.

And he has displayed his urine for thousands in an art piece addressing Asian identity, cowards and drug testing, cheekily titled "Yellow, Yellower, Yellowest."

Clearly, humor, boldness and eccentricity were already Joo's co-pilots by the time he landed in Alaska in 2001.

In the past seven years, the New York artist has made as many trips here to do research and shoot video. This week he brought the completed artwork back to its source for a new exhibit at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center. He has already shown some of his Alaska-made work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and galleries in New York and Seoul.

"I'm very nervous about it, in a way," Joo said in the midst of hanging his life-sized caribou sculptures from the museum ceiling.

"To bring it back to where it originated, for me, it's really a big sense of completion."

His first installation is a series of six caribou sculptures suspended in midair, their bellies split open to reveal infrared cameras. Those cameras project images of the viewers live onto a series of flat-screen TVs, making the viewer part of the art.

The other installation is a video triptych projected on a 35-foot wall. The footage includes Joo's 80-mile walk on the Dalton Highway to Deadhorse, a short film he shot in Barrow and a nature-centric experiment in which he placed a taxidermy caribou in the wild, much to the puzzlement of a local wolf.

"It's very fresh," said Anchorage Museum director James Pepper Henry. He believes this is the first multimedia exhibit at the museum incorporating electronic media. "I think it is going to challenge our patrons. It's something ... very different for them, and I think that's good."

Joo emphasizes, "There's no single answer to the artwork." But he has laid deliberate ideas one atop another like bricks, from complex scientific concepts to questions of race to funny observations about nature programs.

"Generally, I think most people experience nature as this thing brought to you by the media, something that's ultimately pretty romantic and you place your willpower on it, put yourself into it, a blank space to project yourself into. Classically, it's been used as that.

"At the same time, when you turn your back on it, it can kill you."

A HAIR IN THE DRAIN

To understand how caribou and infrared cameras and the Dalton Highway all connect in Joo's mind, it helps to know a little about the soft-spoken Korean-American artist.

In his youth, Joo went from being a Midwestern boy, experiencing life from the lens of "the only Asian family in town," to scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins to pay for art classes. Today he's the caliber of artist who shows at the Whitney Biennial and in groundbreaking galleries such as White Cube in London.

Science was pivotal in Joo's upbringing because his immigrant parents both worked in agriculture science. He said he spent his youth in a stream up to his knees or crawling around a laboratory.

After a meandering career path filled with stops and starts, including two years of studying biology on the road to doctordom, he nestled into sculpture classes at Washington University in St. Louis.

"At the time, sculpture was like the shower drain of the arts ... and I was one of those hairs caught in the drain," he said. "But I liked it, because it really seemed to integrate a lot of ways of making art. ... It almost had a research feel, so it was familiar. Something like a science lab and a construction site at the same time. It had a lot of energy."

Over the past two decades, Joo has relished experimenting with materials and methods of delivery. But there have been constants in his themes. Identity politics, biology and the tension of nature versus artifice all play big on the screen of his artistic life. Consider his piece "Improved Rack #3," moose antlers he chopped into sections and then reassembled with stainless steel rods, making them symmetrical and stronger, a question mark about tinkering with nature.

"Some artists are clear from day one what and how they want to communicate," Joo said. "For me, it's been a more circuitous route with signposts, moments of clarity."

THREE-RING SPECTACLE

In the Anchorage installation "Remote Sense," Joo's caribou sculptures are a uniform gray plastic, their joints articulated to give the appearance they're pose-able, as if you might find "Mattel" stamped on their rumps. The only things natural about them are their racks, which are real.

In Korean culture, antlers are common components of traditional medicine. Ground antler is used in tea or soup. Slices of antler velvet are steeped in tea. Some drink the blood of fresh-cut antlers.

"The antler, for me, is something that's between nature and homeopathic science, and also a strange, flawed design, this defensive thing that's centimeters from the brain," Joo said. "It's funny and awkward in a sense, but in another way deadly serious, symbolic of violence and vitality."

Infrared cameras inside each sculpted caribou belly project live images onto a wall of flat-screen TVs. As the viewer takes in the sculpture, the sculpture looks back. As the viewer approaches the animal, he sees himself.

By including the electronic components, Joo considers how humans, nature and technology affect one another.

The sculpture installation easily segues into Joo's large-scale film installation, "Circannual Rhythm," shot entirely in Alaska. Joo said the underlying concept is the portrayal of nature and indigenous people on TV and in movies.

In Joo's film, three sequences play simultaneously. The left sequence Joo calls "nature documentary gone awry." It's based on an "experiment with artistic license," in which he put a camera in the abdominal cavity of a taxidermy caribou, along with dried meat and inflated sheep gut. He then parked the sculpture outdoors near Willow and Talkeetna and filmed 24 hours a day for two weeks as the maggots and flies settled in.

In one frame, a curious wolf sniffs at the intestine, then takes a tentative bite.

Joo approached the right-hand sequence like a TV re-enactment, hiring Barrow whale hunters for a faux architectural dig. One of the men collapses into a seizure and then transforms into a cartoon, a deliberately Disney-fied Eskimo.

The film's middle sequence is shot documentary style, but it's actually a performance art piece. Joo bought cowboy boots and a Western shirt in Fairbanks, pulled together a satchel of food and walked parts of the Dalton Highway going north. In total, he said, he walked nearly 80 miles to get the 20 minutes of footage seen in the museum.

He spent the two weeks with a film crew but, as part of the performance, didn't speak to them. He ate and drank minimally.

Eventually the lonely miles end when Joo encounters an Inupiaq speaker, hired actor Marvin Kanayurak of Barrow. Kanayurak tries to communicate with Joo, who responds with a mute, uncomprehending squint. Finally, Joo just walks away. Special effects slowly fizzle out the Native character.

"Since I was a kid, I've been fascinated with Alaska, the land strait and the connections Alaska's Native people have to my ancestors in Korea. I was caught up in the romance of that," he said.

"Alaska is a staging ground in the largest sense. There's no place like it, and it drew me here. This project felt inevitable."

Find Sarah Henning online at adn.com/contact/shenning or call 257-4323.

MICHAEL JOO will exhibit "Circannual Rhythm" and "Remote Sense" through Sept. 21 at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, 121 W. Seventh Ave. Admission costs $8, $7 seniors/students/military, free for ages 17 and younger. (343-4326, anchoragemuseum.org)

NATIONAL HONORS: Joo's Anchorage exhibit is one of the first fruits for Alaska from the United States Artists national artist-in-residence program, founded in part by the Rasmuson Foundation. Joo was in the inaugural class. Besides his $50,000 fellowship, he was connected with the museum, which supported him artistically and paid for his housing and travel in the state. For more information on the program, visit

unitedstatesartists.org

2-Minute Biography: Michael Joo

In school: Master's degree from Yale School of Art; bachelor's degree from Washington University, St. Louis

On display: His solo exhibits have found a home at galleries such as London's White Cube. His work was chosen for the Whitney Biennial and is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Denver Art Museum and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Behind the scenes: In Joo's film installation, Marvin Kanayurak ad-libs in Inupiaq. Joo said he learned later that Kanayurak was mostly taunting him about things like his crappy cowboy boots. /span>

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