ART-PRESENTATION:Do Ho Suh-Passage

Born in Seoul, Do Ho Suh is informed by his personal experiences in his work, particularly his move from South Korea to the USA in 1993, as well as the specific domestic spaces where he has lived, including his childhood home, a house in Rhode Island where he lived as a student, and his apartment in New York. Transparency, or the oscillation between opacity and visibility, appears throughout much of the artist’s work, evoking the layering of space and intermediate areas in Korean architecture.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: CAC Archive

Do Ho Suh in the exhibition “Passage” presents a number of his iconic installations, highlighting hallucinatory structures as metaphors for the struggle of all people to reformulate historical notions of settlement. Do Ho Suh first began rendering domestic structures in 1994, an impulse turned into life’s work. Suh also weaves transparent structures made of monochrome polyester, at once luminous, architectural, and ephemeral, inviting viewers to wander through their dreamlike interior passageways (which might be replete with toilets and light switches). These transplanted homes are playful and imaginative but also deeply melancholy in their manifestation of disorientation: as impressions of the many residences in which Suh and his family have lived, they testify to the global and poignantly elusive nature of “home” as seen through the artist’s eyes. Suh’s work is intensely responsive to site, and in the exhibition he proposes a groundbreaking dialog with the now iconic Architecture of Zaha Hadid, spoken through the movement of bodies through space. “Passage” includes a pair of Suh’s most iconic installations as well as a series of structures newly produced for this exhibition. The centerpiece of the show is a three-story stairwell from Suh’s monumental rendering of his New York apartment at 348 West 22nd Street, detaching it from function to amplify it as transition. This path moves through multiplied layers of memory as seen in the seminal work “Reflection”, a mirrored replica of the gate to the artist’s childhood home in Korea. In the “Hub” series, the present continues to remap the past as Suh connects various rooms, halls and thresholds from apartments in Berlin and London into a constellation where timelines merge and marry into one. Within these structures, the “Specimen Series” mines deeper into the details of Suh’s domestic existence, turning everyday appliances into uncanny lightboxes. Suh’s prolific drawing practice will also play an important role in the exhibition, highlighting the significant role and varied forms this medium plays in his oeuvre. The exhibition features a wide spectrum of his works on paper, including drawings rendered in pen, pencil, ink, and watercolor as well as Suh’s large-scale rubbings.

Info: Curator Steven Matijcio, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, 44 E. 6th Street, Cincinnati, Duration: 12/2-11/9/16, Days & Hours: Sat-Mon 10:00-16:00, Wed-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.contemporaryartscenter.org