At Lehmann Maupin’s booth at last week’s “Art Basel Miami Beach 2025”, Do Ho Suh’s seminal work Some/One (2014) made an immediate visual impact.
 
The work was acquired by a collector on the fair’s second day for 1 million USD and is reportedly destined as a promised gift to a major American museum. Another version of this piece is known to be in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

Created in 2014, the work emerged from Suh’s attempt to move beyond the individual and delve into questions of collective and public identity.
 
The structure, which resembles a suit of armor or ceremonial garment, is hollow inside, while its outer surface is composed of tens of thousands of ‘dog tags’. These countless shimmering metal identity plates, linked together into a kind of protective shell or ritual figure, embody the tension between individual and collective, and visualize how a single person’s existence can be revealed or erased within a larger group. Dog tags function as devices for identifying individuals, but within this work they are anonymized and operate as endlessly repeated units.
 
This sculpture does not narrate a story. It does not explicitly reference the military, the nation-state, or any specific society. Instead, it uses form to show how individuals are absorbed and standardized within collective and institutional structures. While this inquiry grows out of experiences tied to Korean society, it refuses to confine those experiences to a single cultural case study. It is precisely at this point that Some/One becomes a work that can be read anywhere in the world.

Suh’s preoccupation with these issues is already evident in his late-1990s school uniform works. In High School Uni-Form (1997), identical uniforms are arranged in a grid, presenting a structure in which the shape of the collective remains while the individual is conspicuously absent. The school uniform is an institutional shell imposed during adolescence, yet in the work it appears only as a repeated form from which the body has been removed.

The questions posed in the uniform works are further condensed in Some/One. The uniform of the education system is extended into the insignia of the nation-state, and a multitude of discrete objects coalesce into a single bodily figure. Without emotional excess or explanatory rhetoric, Suh pushes his inquiry forward through form alone. This method is a consistent hallmark of his practice.

The reason Do Ho Suh is often cited as an artist representative of Korea is not because he “shows Korean imagery” particularly well. Rather, it is because he succeeds in transforming Korean experiences into a structure of perception that can be understood universally, precisely by refusing to foreground “Koreanness” as a theme.

This carries significant implications for the overseas expansion of Korean contemporary art. It suggests the possibility that works can “operate on their own” without requiring additional explanation of context or cultural difference. Suh’s practice exemplifies a mature pathway through which Korean artists can encounter and engage with the global art world.
 
Some/One is not a work that simply “represents” a particular region or issue; it can be read as a sculpture addressing structural sensibilities shared across contemporary societies. The tensions between the individual and the group, discipline and protection, sameness and anonymity are questions that resonate globally, and this work crystallizes them into form. As a result, the piece does not remain a one-off spectacle; it is continuously revisited through major exhibitions and collections. Its reappearance at this year’s “Art Basel Miami Beach 2025” is part of this ongoing accumulation.
 
The presentation of Some/One at “Art Basel Miami Beach 2025” signals that the overseas presence of Korean artists is no longer an exceptional event, nor merely a matter of “going abroad.” It is an important sign that works shaped within the Korean context are now being read within the shared visual and conceptual language of global contemporary art.