The artist of research

Do Ho Suh is a contemporary Korean artist known for his sculptures and installations. Often based on the subject of architecture, Suh questions standard notions of scale in relation to public spaces. An example of this can be seen in his installation Fallen Star (2012)—a vernacular cottage perched on the edge of the University of California San Diego’s engineering building. “The space I’m interested in is not only a physical one but an intangible, metaphorical and psychological one,” he has explained. Born in 1962 in Seoul, South Korea, he served mandatory time in his country’s military before studying at Seoul National University. Relocating to the United States, he went on to receive his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. In the years following the completion of his education, the artist has lived an itinerant life and often incorporates his roaming existence into the fabric of his art practice. He currently lives and works between New York, NY, London, United Kingdom, and Seoul, South Korea.

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.

In times of increasing globalisation and migration, it is more important than ever to stop and reflect for a moment on the significance of individual places. Suh’s work arises from a need to suss out the contours of space and the concept of identity. This is the result of the artist’s personal experience with having to repeatedly uproot his existence and then form new attachments during his many intercontinental migrations. The contrast between the U.S. and South Korea also plays a major role in his work, as it confronts Suh with his own identity. The cultures of the two countries have very different perspectives on the individual and the collective. In his own work, for instance, Suh places the person in opposition to the universal, the physical alongside the incorporeal and the individual versus the collective identity.

Some of his works.

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Work cited page

http://www.artnet.com/artists/do-ho-suh/

https://www.voorlinden.nl/exhibition/do-ho-suh/?lang=en

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