Do Ho Suh


Do Ho Suh is a Korean sculptor and installation artist. He also works across various media, paintings and film which explores the concept of space and home.
Suh was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1962. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Seoul National University in Oriental Painting. He also studied at Rhode Island School of Design where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting in 1994. Then, in 1997, he received a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Yale University. Suh currently has live-in studios located in London, New York City, and Seoul. Suh was named the Wall Street Journal's Innovator of the Year in Art in 2013. He represented Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

Early life

His father, Suh Se-Ok, was a famous artist who led a 1960s art movement to combine traditional ink paintings with new meanings and concepts from the abstract art movement that was happening in the West. Suh grew up in Seoul and after failing to get the grades needed to become a marine biologists, he applied for art school. After receiving a master's degree in traditional Korean painting, he moved to the United States to continue his painting education in 1991. Immigrating to the United States affected how Suh interpreted home and created an overarching theme in his works where he explores space and how we interact with it. This can be seen in his piece, "Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home" which is a silk replica of his childhood home, as well as his piece "Fallen Star" that featured a traditional Korean home crashing into a Los Angeles building. Moving to the US removed the association Suh had to his father, "I felt relieved when I went to the States, I felt much more freedom". It allowed him to make his own work and not be compared to his father.

Influences

Suh's work has a central focus on architecture, space, and identity. His early work blended into the gallery space and was barely discernible to the viewer as art. His most famous works are made of nylon or silk skillfully sewn into forms that represent spaces in Suh's life to scale. Immigrating to the United States affected how Suh interpreted home and created an overarching theme in his works where he explores space and how we interact with it. This can be seen in his piece, "Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home" which is a silk replica of his childhood home, as well as his piece "Fallen Star" that featured a traditional Korean home crashing into a Los Angeles building. Suh also challenges the uses of varies materials, for instance, "Do Ho Suh: 348 West 22nd Street" is a work created with luminous swaths of translucent polyester, which features his own history of migration from Korea to New York, a replica of the ground-floor residence when he first arrived the United States. Moving to the US removed the association Suh had to his father, "I felt relieved when I went to the states, I felt much more freedom".

Exhibitions

Suh has had solo exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Serpentine Gallery, London, Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, the Artsonje Center in Korea, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark and the Museum Voorlinden in Netherlands. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, , Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Suh has participated in numerous biennials, including the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2010, he was shown in the Liverpool Biennial, the Venice Biennale Architecture, and Media City Seoul Biennial, and the 9th Gwangju Biennale in 2012.

Public collections

Suh's work is found in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Seattle Asian Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Towada Art Center.
Selected works include: