Soo Joo has spent a lot of time in front of the camera. She was the first Asian-American spokesperson for L’Oreal, a global ambassador for Chanel, and has been featured in Dazed editorials right back to 2012. But, through it all, the now 38-year old Korean-American had been concealing her first creative passion from the world: music. “I first attempted making music over a decade ago, around the time of GarageBand and ‘bloghouse’ establishing certain soundscapes,” Soo Joo tells Dazed. “But then I started modelling and it consumed a large part of my time and energy. I secretly hoped to make music seriously someday, but never fully went back to it until a few years ago.”
It was during this return to music that Soo Joo stumbled upon the modern legend of Annlee – or, rather, as Soo Joo puts it: “Annlee came to me.” Part fictional character, part thought experiment, Annlee was a stock anime figure purchased from a Japanese animation house by French artists Pierre Hughe and Philippe Parreno in 1999, whose goal was to ‘liberate’ Annlee by making her open source and allow her to explore her own identity through the works of other artists. In a sense, they gave Annlee ‘life’.
The mythical character was symbolically retired from the open source space a few years later, but these themes of creative agency and bodily autonomy resonated with Soo Joo, becoming a guiding force behind her debut EP, No Ghost. In single “Kiss Me”, Annlee’s face is superimposed onto Soo Joo as lyrics call to a deep-rooted innocence within her, while ethereal production sits somewhere between shoegaze and progressive electronica.
The track also marks a subtle nod back to the moments she fell in love with music in the first place. “During my late teens in university I sometimes volunteered at the radio station, it was an excellent excuse to go into their incredible archive to rip as many CDs as possible and get free tickets for concerts,” she explains. “I discovered that shoegaze and 50s country pop really resonated with me. I’d just watched Mulholland Drive, and wanted to try to meld that kind of insidiously haunting, melancholic, vivid imagery to those sounds, [my music] started from those as jump-off points.”
Pivoting from modelling agencies to renewed creative agency is not a choice Soo Joo has taken lightly, and she admits that she “can’t count how many times I’ve laid frozen at night in a sea of anxiety and fear about sharing the music I’d written.” But embedded within her musical debut are values and passions that have been present right from the start of her career.
Below, Soo Joo breaks down some of the personal references underpinning the EP.
Soo Joo: Annlee is a fictional character created by artists Philippe Parreno and Pierre Hughe through the years 1999 to 2003. A stock anime character who was presented as an open source, until the artists ‘helped’ her retire with ownership of herself; the idea of meta-identity that feels so relevant today.
She came to me while I was trying to find creative direction and imagery for my EP, and has become a key that opened a portal into this project. Her narrative in Philippe Parreno’s piece, Anywhere Out of the World: ‘Designed to join any kind of story but with no chance to survive any of them. I was never designed to survive… I. Am. A product. A product freed from the marketplace I was supposed to fill’ really stuck with me.
In many aspects of my work, I’ve been the avatar to someone else’s product or vision. By drawing a line between myself and Annlee, I ask the audience to consider my own agency, versus the symbols and messages placed upon me.
In conversations with Philippe and Pierre, I had to convey the reasons I felt so obsessed with the idea of Anlee being a part of this piece. We agreed we wouldn’t bring her back to life in a new incarnation (even if we asked her to, she would refuse to return), but rather celebrate her past existence, which had brought myself and the public some interesting questions about identity and autonomy. To complete the cycle, M/M Paris, who have worked closely with them through the years (and created visual language of their own of Annlee), designed the artwork for the EP.
Soo Joo: The purity in country ballads! The simplicity in rhythmic schemes and progressions in 50s pop music just floors me. There’s a sense of melancholy and longing that I’m attracted to. Singers like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Connie Francis, Peggy Lee, and of course Roy Orbison, they’re all such masters.
Soo Joo: Emily Okuda-Overhoff, who directed the ‘Kiss Me’ video, recommended this book to me. I love how utterly consumed the narrator is by love: I love love. The devotion, desire, obsession, and pain it renders in your entire being is so universal.
Soo Joo: A great futurist manga and anime created by Masamune Shirow. It’s also referenced in No Ghost, Just A Shell, the title of the Annlee exhibition. I watched the Arise anime movie around the time when I first started making music, I think. The soundtrack by Cornelius is really great, too. But I am not just a shell, and no ghost, either, hence my EP title.
No Ghost is out now.
