Do Ho Suh PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOLLISON
KOREAN-BORN artist Do Ho Suh moved to London a few years ago to be with his wife, he missed his adopted home of New York. He kept a 500-square-foot live-in studio there, in a former sailors’ dorm in Chelsea.
Many of Suh’s most famed sculptures had reimagined his homes—in translucent fabric or resin, or as a painstakingly detailed, oversize dollhouse—from his childhood in Seoul and his young adulthood in the United States.
Du Ho Suh, New York Apartment in Color, 2013
At Art School, Suh couldn’t get into the classes he most wanted to take and ended up enrolling in The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture. “It changed the course of my life,” Suh says, adding that the professor, Jay Coogan, “is responsible for my becoming a sculptor.” Presented with the first assignment—use clothing to consider the human condition—Suh delved into ideas about the body, a topic that was taboo in Korea.
Around the same time, the Rodney King riots erupted in Los Angeles, and news images of armed Korean immigrants protecting their stores made Suh think for the first time about how non-Koreans perceived his ethnic group. His classmates, he recalls, all younger than he, related neither to the immigrant experience nor to the mandatory military training that every Korean man, himself included, must endure.
Du Ho Suh, Metal Jacket, 2009
Fastening thousands of army dog tags to a military jacket, Suh created his first major sculpture: Metal Jacket. The modern-day coat of armor touched on many of the themes—personal space; the tension between the individual and the group; the inevitable culture clashes that arise with human migration—that continue to preoccupy his work, and it also became the prototype for Some/One, the imposing robe made of dog tags. From a distance, the viewer sees each sculpture as a single silvery surface. Only upon closer inspection does it register as a mosaic of dog tags, each representing an individual soldier.
“Do Ho is exploring issues of what divides us and what unites us as human beings.”
Suh made versions of his parents’ house in Seoul—a traditional slope-roofed hanok, quite out of style when his father commissioned a former carpenter at the royal palace to build it from reclaimed wood in the 1970s—in dreamy fabric, suspended from a gallery ceiling. “It has an interesting narrative,” he says of his childhood house. “But then, every building, every space, has that. It’s just not told.“
Using fabric gave the pieces a ghostlike quality. Viewers were invited to enter some of the installations, heightening the sensation of being in a home, or the memory of one. Suh recalls how his brother, an architect, was disconcerted to see strangers wandering under a version of their family home at a 2000 exhibition at New York’s P.S. 1 museum.
Du Ho Suh, Fallen star, 2008 – 2011
Fallen Star 1/5 (2008–11), one of his best-known works, takes a more solid model of that hanok and crashes it through the wall of a carefully furnished, dollhouse-like re-creation of the apartment building where he lived in Providence. Contrary to most viewers’ assumptions, his various home pieces are not exact replicas. “It’s intrinsically impossible to make them exact,” he says. “I wanted to achieve something intangible. It’s about memory, time spent in the space.”
In addition to exploring ideas about culture shock, Suh’s works can have a sense of humor.
Says his longtime friend and fellow artist Janice Kerbel: “The works in a way are like him—they’re these very gentle things, almost like specters. There’s something ethereal about Do Ho—he doesn’t seem to belong to the place he’s in.”
In 2010, Suh moved to London to join his second wife, Rebecca Boyle Suh, a British arts educator. Their first daughter was born soon after; their second followed this past summer. “I’ve been following my loves,” Suh says of his continent hopping, adding with a laugh, “it was never a career move.” If anything, London has been tougher to adjust to than the United States. “Things are so different here. I feel like it’s a completely different language, mentality and humor. I miss a lot of American values—like being straightforward and more relaxed.”
His life in London revolves around family. He is not one to join the art world social scene. “His commitment to his practice is so intense,” says Kerbel, who is also based in London. “He’s a quiet person and keeps very much to himself. He needs that time to be alone and in his head.”
