Michael Joo's solo exhibition Sweat Models 1991–2026 closed this past April at Space ZeroOne in Tribeca, New York. Centered on works from the 1990s that constitute the artist's early practice, the exhibition highlighted the context in which Joo formed a multidisciplinary practice drawing from technology, science, architecture, environmental studies, and other systems of knowledge.

Joo's early works, many of which had not been exhibited for many years or were realized for the first time in this exhibition, refer back to his undergraduate studies in biology. The works from this period attend to the social and technological aspects of creative spaces such as the laboratory and the kitchen. Joo sees these spaces as similar to the artist's studio: places where knowledge can be questioned, gained, and shared. His early works are built around modes of measurement and consumption to produce a sense of abstraction and distance through specific materials.

The works presented in the exhibition are closely tied to the social context of the 1990s, including the AIDS crisis and the mass adoption of information technology, and concern the human body and its vulnerabilities without explicitly depicting the body. Translating the knowledge systems of creative spaces such as the laboratory and the kitchen into a sculptural language, Joo persistently explores the fragility of the body and the artifice of identity construction through everyday and industrial materials such as synthetic sweat, urinal cakes, salt blocks, and bags of MSG. The principal works in the exhibition, including the large-scale installation Concatenations, presented anew more than three decades later, dismantle the contradictions of racial stigma and systems of classification, presenting the body and society as a multilayered state of "shimmer."