Sook Jin Jo at OK Harris

Contemporary artists use quotidian objects to express everything from Duchampian irony and Koonsian commodity fetishism to tender recuperation. New York-based Korean artist Sook Jin Jo belongs to the latter camp. Her sculptures and installations are composed of found and battered objects gathered into abstract compositions. But unlike John Chamberlain's crumpled car bodies or Tony Cragg's early assemblages of colorful plastic discards, Jo's compositions celebrate nature rather than industry. Objects like turned and polished chair legs, old boards, bits of dismantled wooden crates or musical instruments, and worn shoe soles are arranged within rectangular or box-shaped armatures or placed on the floor in configurations that evoke Zen gardens or thickets of trees.

The most dramatic work in this show was All Things Work Together, an elaborate installation of wood scraps and branches. It spread over the floor with a fecund exuberance that brought to mind cypress vines, plants that take root wherever they touch the ground. Dense and prickly, it presented a structure that one could walk around but not through. Individual elements such as pieces of driftwood or bits of furniture retained traces of their former life, but also melted into the larger organic whole.

While All Things Work Together was made for this show, there were also older works on view. Zen Garden (1998) is composed of a set of rusted solar turbines scattered over the floor. These squat metal chimneylike structures suggest ceremonial Japanese lamps, a resemblance that contributed to a feeling of ritualistic space in the gallery. Two of the turbines were set within old wooden picture frames that marked out the space and enhanced the sense of quiet formality.

The picture frame reappears as an ordering element in wall works such as 300 Wishes (2003-04), a wooden grid hung with scraps of eccentrically dissimilar pieces of old furniture and other wooden implements. Bolted to the horizontal bars, the scraps hang down in irregular clusters. According to the artist, each represents a wish. Jo and her husband installed most of them, though other people were also invited to contribute items to the work. The Way Things Are/Resistance and Transformation (1999-2003) contains similar clusters, this time strung through metal bars that run horizontally across a massive wooden frame resting on the floor.

Jo celebrates the second lives of discarded objects. In the process she makes the case for the continuity between nature and culture, past and present, East and West.

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