Do Ho Suh
Karma appears as an anomaly. It is unlike Suh’s fabric sculptures, which have about them a lasting sense of absence; their emptiness made visible, their form hollowed out. Where his interiors are insubstantial, Karma is heavy and unmoving. It belongs among a series of sculptures in which the repetition of the human figure is given architectural significance, each becoming a small part of a larger, abstract whole. In Karma, the recurring figures are arranged in an elegant curve, each balanced one on top of another. All are unseeing, their eyes covered by the hands of the figure above them. And so they ascend, blindly, growing smaller as they grow higher. Or rather, they descend – from the past into the present. In image as in title, the work evokes the inheritance of the lives that precede us, recalling genealogy’s line and time’s unbroken passage. From a distance, the figures appear as the many vertebrae of a spine.
b.1962, Seoul
With conceptual clarity and an economy of image, Do Ho Suh recalls the past in material presence. He is best known for his translucent replicas of interior spaces, which appear as memories given a momentary form. Most are named for the houses Suh has lived in, and he has lived in many, moving restlessly back and forth between South Korea, the United States, and England. Weightless and delicate, his gossamer-like structures offer a sense of only transient belonging. Much of Suh’s practice is marked by a repetition of form, material and gesture, which gives shape to his thematic concerns: the multiplicity of the individual, and the individual in the multiple. As with his ephemeral spaces, Suh’s work explores what the architecture of belonging might look like, be it physical or metaphorical – a place, a history, a sense of home.
