Do Ho Suh, a South Korean artist, focuses on creating installations that “question identity“. His work is featured in several places, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo). Do ho Suh pushes the boundaries of space in order to create unique location-set installations, such as Home Within Home.

Home Within Home, Installation view (2012)

Home Within Home demonstrates a keen understanding of the structure and foundation of a structure such as a home. However, instead of rendering the house with the standard building materials (such as brick), Do Ho Suh utilizes silk in order to create the feeling that we are peering at a three-dimensional version of a building “blueprint.” Do Ho Suh’s unique ability to create these massive yet ethereal-like structures (through the use of a nearly transparent medium) is unlike anything I have ever seen before. The piece almost seems to be reminiscent of a time that is long gone but that still haunts the artist.

In contrast to the artist’s silk-laden installations, High School Uni-Form is comprised of more opaque materials. This piece appears to be questioning identity; there are 300 of the same uniforms standing side by side, yet no individual faces to be found. This piece may suggest that individuality becomes crushed (in a sense) in such an environment in which following guidelines and rules is the most prominent goal. Similar to the ghost-like structures of houses and items that Do Ho Suh has created, this piece has a familiar sense of eeriness. It seems like a more modern rendition of the large group of terracotta warriors of early Chinese history; yet this piece does not show individualization but uniformity (in the literal and ideal sense).

High School Uni-Form (1997) – fabric, plastic, stainless steel, casters,
300 parts

Overall, I find his work strange yet utterly captivating. I want to be able to entrance viewers as much as he does with my own work and hope to utilize materials besides the regular media (like graphite) in order to convey conceptions. Do Ho Suh stands as a testament to the great lengths that humans can go in order to convey ideas, both tangible and abstract. His amazing ability to render subjects in purely silk and string first captured my attention. Nonetheless, all of his work are extraordinary because they challenge gravity, space, and question how we produce and see art.