Perfect Home Artworks displayed in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.
Do Ho Suh draws attention to the ways viewers occupy and inhabit public space. Interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations, Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity. His work explores the relation between individuality, collectivity and anonymity.
Staircase IV, 2004 , translucent nylon, dimensions variable
Reflection, 2004, nylon and stainless steel tube, dimensions variable
In exquisitely made works, Do Ho Suh explores contemporary arrangements of space and the unstable boundaries of its categorisation along lines of individuality and collectivity, physicality and immateriality, mobility and fixity. Influenced by his peripatetic existence – leaving his native South Korea to study and live in the United States, he has more recently moved between New York, Seoul and London – an enduring theme of the artist's practice is the connection between the individual and the group across global cultures.
The multiplicity of individuality is tested through meditative processes of repetition: whether interlinked along a lattice of fishing nets, amassed into monumental tornado-like forms, absent from ranks of empty uniforms, or present in every yearbook photo taken at the artist's high school over 60 years, the artist uses the reproduced human figure to explore sensitively, and with spectacular formal effect, the ways in which personal space inherently extends into the collective sphere.
Installation View, Do Ho Suh, Home Within Home, 12 November 2013 – 11 May 2014, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
Seoul Home/Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home, 2012, Silk, metal armature, 1457 x 717 x 391 cm
Influenced by his peripatetic existence, an enduring theme of the artist’s practice is the connection between the individual and the group across global cultures.
Boiler Room: London Studio, 2015, Polyester fabric and stainless steel tubes, 217.2 x 155.7 x 185.2 cm
Constructed much like items of clothing, Suh's portable modules of space were designed to be packed in his suitcase as he travelled between continents, the artist's own personal peripatetic history bleeding into the universalised nomadism of a globalised world. Transitory, connecting spaces – corridors, staircases, bridges, gateways – feature often in the artist's drawings and sculptural installations: rather than borders,
Suh is fascinated with the linking spaces through which the body travels between cultures. In this international era, the house is a protective mantle transformed by its arrivals in different contexts: in different works, homes from different stages of the artist's life nest one inside the other in differently coloured swathes of fabric, or come dramatically into collision in painstakingly constructed models.
Specimen Series: Radiator, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2013. Polyester fabric, stainless steel wire, and display case with LED lighting. Edition of 3. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Specimen Series: Refrigerator, Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2015, Polyester fabric, stainless steel wire, and display case with LED lighting, 220.3 x 116.8 x 120.5 cm
This coexistence, which belies simplistic conceptions of cultural authenticity, is further investigated in Suh's large-scale public interventions in cities. With a mobile hotel, parked daily in the neglected gaps of urban fabric, and compact dwellings perched incongruously on existing tower blocks or sandwiched precariously between two neighbouring buildings as if having landed haphazardly after a long journey, the artist considers notions of organisation, proximity and belonging in a networked world.
Installation view, Do Ho Suh, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, 2013–2014. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photograph by Kitmin.com.
Installation view, Do Ho Suh: Passage/s, Victoria Miro, 1 Febuary - 18 March 2017 (photography: Thierry Bal).
Passage/s introduced a new process, in which Suh’s signature architectural pieces are compressed into large-scale two-dimensional ‘drawings’.
Home Within Home – Prototype, 2009-2011
Born in 1962 in South Korea, Do Ho Suh received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in sculpture from Yale University. He currently lives and works in London. Suh represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, and has staged numerous recent international solo exhibitions and site-specific projects at institutional venues including the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati (2016); MOCA Cleveland (2015 - 2016), travelling to MCA San Diego (2016); The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2014); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2013); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2012 - 2013 and 2005); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (2012); University of San Diego, California (2012); Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2012); Seattle Art Museum, Washington (2011 and 2003) and Tate Modern, London (2011). The artist has participated in the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2012), 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2010), and 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010). The first survey exhibition of Do Ho Suh's work in Europe was presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2002.
