Known for his fabric sculptures that reconstruct to scale homes, artist Do Ho Suh (b. 1962) works across various media, creating drawings, film, and sculptural works that confront questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity. Over the past three decades, he has built an international reputation for his intriguing and creative works.

Suh has been constantly questioning his identity since moving to the United States in his late 20s. Floor is a continuation of his interest in identity, and is an exploration of the essential question of ‘self’ in a heterogeneous or homogeneous culture. Tens of thousands of tiny figures made from PVC support thick glass plates with their raised palms. Beneath the platform, different persons are represented in terms of race and sex: black, yellow, white, female and male. The standardized faces of the individuals address issues of individuality and the group and identity and anonymity in a technical, informational, and global society.

The artist’s experience of migration led to his interest in home. For him, ‘home’ is a space of settlement and stability, but also a contradictory space of repeated departure and stay. Fallen Star 1/5 is an installation work in which a hanok house is reduced to one-fifth of its actual size, showing a collision between two buildings. The two buildings are actually the artist’s former home.

The hanok house is based on the house in Seongbuk-dong, Seoul, where the artist lived with his parents, and the western-style building is modeled after the apartment in Brooklyn where he lived while studying abroad in the United States. The work recreates not only the exterior of the house but also the actual objects and structures that made up the interior. As such, the work is permeated with the artist’s personal experiences. The work is imbued with the artist’s personal experience, like the sudden collision of a star, a sudden transition to a completely different world.

The work on homes led to large textile sculptures that reconstructed the surfaces of the artist’s homes in Korea, Rhode Island, Berlin, London, and New York. Suh is interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical forms, and examines how the body relates to, inhabits, and interacts with that space.

He is particularly interested in domestic space and the way the concept of home can be articulated through architecture that has a specific location, form, and history. For Suh, the spaces we inhabit also contain psychological energy, and in his work he makes visible those markers of memories, personal experiences, and a sense of security, regardless of geographic location.

The home series, which are made of fabric that mimics the details of the interior and exterior of the artist’s own home, a private space in which he lived, are transferred to the public space of the museum and become a space for others to come and go. For him, home is a very private space, but also a social space where individuals relate to each other, and it is a hybrid space where past and present, East and West are mixed.

“You change the space you live in, but the memories of the place you lived in seem to lodge deep in your mind like a spider’s web. Like a snail leaving its home, it carries its memories with it to another place. I thought that using silk, like silver thread, would be a good way to show the character of the open space, such as the soft light shining through the window coverings. The same goes for the light switches and outlets. The light switches are different in New York and Seoul, and I felt that I needed to show these things exactly so that I could remind myself of the space.” (LUXURY Magazine, interview with Do Ho Suh, May 2012)

Suh received a B.F.A. in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale University in 1997. Solo exhibitions of his work have recently been organized at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia (2022); Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Bloomberg SPACE, London, United Kingdom (2021); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2019), and he will have a solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London, in May 2025. Since April this year, he has been exhibiting his installation Public Figures at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA)’s Freer Plaza, Washington, D.C., USA.

Recent group exhibitions in which he has participated include “The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989” (2023) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; “UNBUILD: a site of possibility” (2023) at Drawing Room, London, and has been invited to show his work at various biennials, including the Singapore Biennale (2019), Venice Biennale (2018), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Liverpool Biennale (2010), Venice Architecture Biennale (2010), Istanbul Biennale (2003), Sydney Biennale (2002).

Suh’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

References

• 서도호, 리만머핀 (Do Ho Suh, Lehmann Maupin)
• 국립현대미술관, 서도호 | 바닥 | 1997 – 2000 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Do Ho Suh | Floor | 1997 – 2000)
• 인디포스트, 집 속의 집, 작가 서도호, 2018.03.30