Do Ho Suh: The Fabric of Life
As shows of his work open at opposite ends of the US, the nomadic Korean-born artist explains how his coloured cloth installations reflect his transient existence. By Rachel Corbett.
The Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh has made moving around the world — from Seoul to New York and now London — his life’s work. His sheer fabric structures, which replicate the architecture of his past dwellings, give shape to the transience, dislocation and shifting identities that Suh has known. Now the sculptures themselves are hitting the road: : in February, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) opened Passage, a solo exhibition of predominantly new work (until 11 September), while the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is the latest US institution to host the artist’s mid-career survey (18 March-4 July) with a presentation of several of the cloth installations, along with videos and works on paper.
The Art Newspaper: Your cloth houses evoke feelings of both rootedness and uprootedness. Does the fact that the sculptures themselves are now travelling around the country add anything to the way you think about the work?
Do Ho Suh: It’s a strange feeling. Previously I’ve had shows travel to a couple of different places, but never as extensively as this US tour. I feel like I’m in a rock band or something, going to all these small towns. It’s funny because the same pieces are travelling from one end of the US to the other, but each venue is completely different, so each time I show the piece in a different space or location it actually achieves a different layer of meaning. I think it’s kind of similar to my personal experience of leaving home and coming to a different country and moving around, but this time it’s the work itself that is experiencing different things. But because of the specificity of the museum space, I don’t think the Cincinnati show can be replicated. It is very much sitespecific; the whole show is about this transient experience, moving throughout the spaces within the museum and using your body.
The CAC was Zaha Hadid’s first building in the US. How did its angular, unconventional architecture influence the making of your exhibition?
I had been thinking about my Hub series before I was invited to Cincinnati, but sometimes you need to find the right time and place to realise an idea. For me, CAC was the great opportunity to make this project happen. The space is quite challenging and yet quite interesting—it’s not a typical white cube. There’s no clear distinction from one gallery to another, so I saw it as one continuous space. Every room has different ceiling heights. The ramp goes all the way to the fourth floor and they have a very tall space with a skylight. It’s the perfect place for my show, which is titled Passage because of the work’s relationship to the museum’s architecture. The way the exhibition is designed, you go through different spaces and in my practice I’ve been interested in these different kinds of transitional spaces. So the Hub series is part of this.
How does the Hub series differ from your previous architectural works?
These are architectural pieces that are not designated with any particular function. They are basically in-between spaces, like from the bedroom to the kitchen. You can call it a corridor maybe, but a Hub looks like a room: it’s more square, not long and rectangular, and it has three or four doors because it leads you to the different spaces. Conceptually, the core of the piece is quite similar to older work and when you connect these things together it becomes the passage—the journey of my life over the past 20 years or so starting from Korea and going to the US, Germany and England.