Do Ho Suh

After failing to get the necessary grades to study marine biology, Suh applied to Seoul National University (SNU) to study Oriental painting. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1985 and Master of Fine Arts in 1987 from SNU, and completed the mandatory military service in South Korea before moving to the US to study at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1991. Suh applied to RISD, which was the only American art school that accepted him, in order to move to the US with his first wife, a Korean American graduate student. Suh felt a sense of relief in the US: moving away from Korea allowed the artist to build his career outside of his father's shadow. Although Suh had completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies in Korea, RISD had the artist enroll as a sophomore. Suh attributes his turn to sculpture to artist Jay Coogan, whose course on figuration Suh took when he first started at RISD. This led Suh to create sculptures in the corridors of the school. His artistic interventions focused on these overlooked spaces and drew out their relationship with the people who regularly traverse them. Suh also took courses on pattern-making at the RISD that allowed him to develop the foundational skills he needed to work with fabric. He graduated from RISD with a BFA in 1994. Suh continued studying sculpture at Yale University, and graduated with an MFA in 1997. While at Yale, Suh met Rirkrit Tiravanija. Tiravanija later helped launch Suh's career in New York.

Upon arriving in the US, Suh began measuring spaces in the many new surroundings he went through, and experimenting with altering them. For this temporary installation at RISD, Suh added a laminated birch panel to the floor of a hallway, and a long curved rod that passerby had to walk through in order to get down the hallway.

Suh overlapped images of students from high school yearbooks to create the two computer-generated color photographs. Suh again turned to this reference to Korean high school for his 1996 installation High School Uni-Forms that show sixty school uniforms connected together, and later in 2000 for Who Am We?

The Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles commissioned Suh to create the installation, leading him to begin exploring the question of home through his work. Suh came up with the idea while he was living in New York in the 90s reminiscing about his childhood home. In 1994 he produced a smaller-scale piece—Room 515/516-I/516-II—using muslin in order to see if it was possible to create a large-scale fabric house. He was able to realize the full project in 1999. The installation features a 1:1 replica of Suh's childhood home in Korea, including both the main structure and fixtures like toilets, radiators, and kitchen appliances. The entire installation is made of polyester fabric and silk held up with thin metal rods.

Every time the piece is transported, he adds the name of the city to the title (e.g. Seoul Home/L.A. Home in 1999 for the first exhibition). For Suh, this continual renaming allows the work to hold the traces of each space it traverses, and thus reshape the viewer's notion of what a home is. The movement of the work also allows Suh to carry his childhood memories with him no matter where he goes, therefore making it possible for him to shrink the distance between where he came from and is at the present.

Passageways play a crucial role in Suh's installation in not only connecting different sections, but also, according to Suh, engaging with the exhibition space as a whole. For the installation at the Korean Cultural Center, Suh thought about the center as a space of cultural displacement that transports objects from Korea's past to the now US, and creates physical and conceptual passageways between those two spaces and points in time. Suh plans to connect all of his fabric pieces, including Seoul Home..., under the title The Perfect Home so that a visitor can enter through one door, and travel through replicas of all of Suh's past residences without leaving. Suh has begun to utilize computer modeling software in producing some of these pieces.

Suh links his work with what he describes as the porosity of Korean architecture, exemplified by the doors and windows that exist in lieu of walls, and translucent rice paper that covers them. Suh also chose fabric for his installation thinking about the function of rice paper in traditional Asian painting. Suh's mother was key in finding traditional Korean seamstresses who assisted Suh in making his work. although while he describes his work as "clothing for space," and thus drawing from the vocabulary of Korean costumes, such as magenta thread for stitching, Suh does claim that in the end his work veers closer to industrial design and architecture than to fashion. Suh has also written about Joseon artist Kim Jeong-hui's 1844 painting Landscape in Winter, both expressing admiration for the work showing a small house, and connecting it to Suh's own desire to create the perfect home.

Suh again explored the possibility of transforming the structure of the exhibition space with Floor. The site-specific installation raised the floor of the gallery, inviting viewers to walk on the forty glass panels supported by 180,000 cast plastic human figures. The work was featured in the 2001 Venice Biennale.

The installation features high-school yearbook photos from Korea from over three decades of graduating classes juxtaposed together, and printed on sheets of paper pasted to the wall. Both Floor and Who Am We? are examples of works that curators and critics have described in terms of the individual/collective dichotomy. While Suh does acknowledge that his pieces do engage with the concept, he foregrounds their role in shaping a viewer's experience of space, and considers the tendency of ascribe individuality to the West and collectivity to the East to be reductive.

Suh's Paratrooper works feature an elliptical piece of fabric embroidered with the names of people who are connected to Suh in some way. The threads used for the names extends beyond the fabric, and are gathered together in the hand of a sculpture of a paratrooper elevated on a platform. Suh has described the work as being able to function as anyone's self-portrait as the installation shows how the point at which all relationships meet is where the individual comes into being. Suh has also cited the multiple valences of the Korean word inyeon as a central idea at play for the work. Paratrooper was the first work Suh made and showed in Korea. After showing the work in Korea, and then the US, Suh noted the difference in reception for the work. He found that Korean audiences had an emotional response to the work while American audiences read the piece as a commentary on the military.

Speculation Project is a thirteen-part work narrating Suh's journey from Korea to the US. The first chapter, Fallen Star: Wind of Destiny (2006), is composed of styrofoam and resin. The piece commissioned by Artspace in San Antonio, shows a miniature Korean house atop a white tornado. The next chapter, Fallen Star: A New Beginning (1/35th Scale) (2006) reveals that the house has crashed into the Providence building Suh lived in during his RISD days. Fallen Star: Epilogue (1/8th Scale) (2006) features the same collision, but with new brick and scaffolding. Suh has emphasized the whimsicality of many of the works in the series for both him and the viewer. The project has allowed Suh to revisit his childhood love for toys and model-making.

The work both references a specific film (The Wizard of Oz), and explores the relationship between the viewer and cinematic space with a 1:5 scale model of Suh's childhood in Korea colliding with a similarly sized replica of his Providence apartment. The impact bifurcates the Providence house, splitting not only the building, but also all of its contents, right down the middle. In contrast, the Korean hanok has only a Singer sewing table and parachute fabric and string inside.