Do Ho Suh

One of my favorites Do Ho Suh...

Celebrated Korean artist Do Ho Suh has followed his own path from the very beginning. After receiving an MFA in painting from Seoul National University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Suh jumped forms, studying at Yale's sculpture department. Internationally exhibited and collected, Suh splits his time between Seoul and New York, where Artkrush editor Paul Laster recently sat down with the artist to discuss his work and its sublime interpretation of notions of displacement, identity, and karma.

AK: What do you recall from your early years in Korea?

DHS: I was born in 1962, after the military coup that brought Park Chung Hee to power. When I started college in 1981, it was shortly after the Gwangju massacre, a civil uprising against Chun Doo Hwan's military dictatorship. It was a turbulent, militaristic time in Korea, and school uniforms were mandatory. However, my family background was quite different and unique.

AK: How did your home life contrast with the politicized public environment?

DHS: My father, Se Ok Suh, is a painter who pioneered the merging of traditional and modern Korean art. He's always been open to new things, but his background is rooted in traditional culture. Also, my mother is from a very old family, and so she grew up with traditional costumes and cuisines. Ours wasn't an affluent environment, but it was culturally rich. To me, leaving home to go to school everyday was a kind of displacement — I had to leave an unreal environment and enter reality.

AK: You've made many works involving uniforms, including Uni-Form/s: Self-Portrait/s: My 39 Years, which covers a 39-year period of attire. What do uniforms signify to you?

DHS: When I first came to the US, I realized that I could better understand the world through comparison. I was especially interested in the different notions of personal space in Korean and American society. The uniform is a referent not only for Korean society, but for the larger Asian culture — it's able to delimit the body and define one's identity. When I look back on my childhood and my early adult life in Korea, I realize that my generation basically lived in uniforms.

The piece you mentioned is autobiographical; it incorporates specific uniforms from my old schools. People who went to different schools had different styles of uniforms, but they would have had similar experiences. My question has always been about the boundary of individual space and what really defines and makes an individual, and my uniform pieces have grown out of that.

AK: Military duty is mandatory in Korea. When did you serve?

DHS: After I completed my master's in Oriental painting. That would have been quite late for most Korean men, who usually go into the military before they're 20, but service can be postponed if you go to grad school.

AK: Did you make any art while you were in the military?

DHS: Yes, my service was for 18 months, and in the later part, I was able to commute from home, so I had a little time to make art. The work I was making wasn't typical of Korean painting at that time, and people found it quite interesting. I had already shown here and there before, but while I was in the military, I was invited to two big shows. The first was a survey of the best painters of the day at Samsung's Hoam Gallery. The exhibition was controversial because many established artists weren't invited. I was one of the few younger artists, while most of the artists in the show were my teachers. Then, I was invited to be one of three artists to represent Korea in the 1989 São Paolo Biennale.

AK: So you were a soldier-artist.

DHS: I joke about that with Koreans, who all have their own military experiences, but I've never talked about it with anyone outside of Korea. I was still formally a soldier, but anytime the commanders needed something creative, they would call on me. They knew I had an art background, so around the time of the 1988 Olympic Games, others and I were ordered to make Olympic murals and sculptures for our division's compound. It was enjoyable work because we had a lot of freedom — no one bothered us, and we didn't have to wear uniforms — but if we hadn't done well, we could have been punished. The funny part is that they gave us industrial paints, used for painting tanks and such, so we only had four colors to start. We bought a few other basic colors to mix a broader palette.

AK: What was the Korean art scene like when you lived there?

DHS: Korea was still under a militaristic regime, and the Gwangju massacre had a major impact on society. Because of government censorship, we didn't know what was happening. Colleges and universities had been closed for a year because professors and students had joined the uprising. When I began at the university in 1981, we started hearing things from people who had been in Gwangju. The entire time that I was in college, there were student demonstrations, and riot police were omnipresent. Artists joined the protests, creating banners that criticized the regime, and a lot of them were jailed and tortured. There was an underground political-art movement called Minjung that was later validated in the '90s. There was also the mainstream art scene, which had nothing to do with the reality of Korea; it was aesthetic and mainly centered around monochromatic painting.

AK: And the gallery scene?

DHS: The biggest galleries, which are still active, were Kukje Gallery, Gallery Hyundai, Sun Gallery, and Park Yeo Sook Gallery. There were a lot of smaller galleries in the Insadong area, but they were mostly rental galleries; they didn't represent artists. Artists pooled their money and rented the galleries, and the duration of the show was usually one week. There was little support for younger artists.

AK: When and how did the gallery scene start to change?

DHS: Things started to change in the late '80s, because of the Olympics and the growing economy. Outside interest in Korea grew in the early '90s, and the art world began to discover Korean talents, but I had left Korea to study in the US in 1990 and missed that round of development. Lee Bul and Kim Sooja were at the frontier of it, and they were amongst the first group of younger Korean artists embraced in the West.

There was an economic crash in 1997, and the art scene rebuilt itself after the recovery. Kukje Gallery director Park Kyung Mee started showing Western artists, such as the YBAs, as well as up-and-coming Korean artists. She later left Kukje and opened PKM Gallery, which now has two spaces in Seoul and another in Beijing. In 1998, ArtSonje Center opened, and Kim Sun Jung, a talented curator, began to show emerging Korean artists.

AK: Paratrooper-1, from your 2003 show at the ArtSonje Center — your first solo outing in Korea — seems to encapsulate your life up to that point. It incorporates the signatures of people who signed your exhibition guestbooks and people you had logged in your notebooks, and they're brought together in this metaphoric self-portrait of yourself as a paratrooper, falling from the sky into the US. Did you specifically make that piece for your homecoming show?

DHS: Paratrooper-1 was conceived sometime earlier, around 2000. I just didn't have time to execute it before, but your question is interesting. When people saw the piece at the opening, they cried — especially old ladies — because the whole piece is about the Korean notion of in yeon. It's about karma, and specifically the fated connections in life. For example, if you're my parent, spouse, or friend in this life, we probably had a very significant relationship in a past life. Meetings aren't random — there are all these invisible strings attached. We always say "strings of in yeon" in Korea, and so I used the expression literally.

AK: You also explored this idea of connectedness in Karma, where two massive legs trample on or are supported by a mass of tiny figures. It's also visible in your drawings, where people are carried or born out of themselves, and in many of your sculptures, including Public Figures and Cause & Effect. Western audiences mostly understand karma as a force acting upon the individual, but your conceptions suggest something much more collectively organizing.

DHS: It's an organic way to explore the boundaries of this notion of individualism, in which each individual is the accumulation of so many different and discrete things. It's then that the accumulation of so many different and discrete individuals creates a bigger group, a bigger country, and a bigger world.

AK: Do you see the theme of history that you've explored in your Korean house project — which has traveled all around the world and grown in title and nature and form — as an expression of some fundamental concern? Is it a longing for what's lost, or is it about wanting to carry something with you?

DHS: The first Korean house, which was a replica of my family house in fabric, was probably about longing. It had to do with displacement — when you're physically and psychologically displaced, longing develops, and you carry it with you constantly. I visualized it in the space of personal memory and history, but the piece transcends personal history because the original house was built in a traditional style of Korean architecture. Like Uni-Form/s, I started with something intimate, but the project evolved beyond that. When it was shown at P.S.1's 2000 Greater New York show, it floated above the crowd like something gently falling from the sky. Its translucency and the lightness made it seem like the ghost of a home. It was my home, but at the same time, it became everybody's home. People gathered under it. It was an experience.

Like Paratrooper-1, the house allowed me to land softly and safely in this foreign country. The parachute, the house — they're both spaces that protect you. Then there are the strings of in yeon — lifelines of people and their love, their help, their thoughts of you — that connect you to those spaces.

AK: All of your house and apartment pieces have been transparent, up until Fallen Star, which you recently showed at London's Hayward Gallery. In the piece, a traditional Korean house literally collides into a brownstone, which I understand was your apartment building in Providence. It falls from the sky like a paratrooper, or, as has been noted before, like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz. How did this piece come about?

DHS: I wrote a story about the journey of a Korean house that was lifted by a tornado, flew over the Pacific Ocean, and landed in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was going to school. But the house didn't just drop from the sky — it had a parachute. When the house started to descend, the chute opened so it didn't totally crash; it came down slowly, hit the corner of the Providence building, and got stuck. It's not a "boom," but a delayed impact. The one at the Hayward, which was a 1:5 scale model, didn't have the parachute, but I have a smaller version, one that's a 1:35 scale model, that does. Both works are chapters from a much bigger story, which I'll be exploring further in shows in Los Angeles and Houston next year.

Do Ho Suh's work is currently on view in group exhibitions at Espace Louis Vuitton in Paris, through December 31, and at New York's Museum of Arts & Design, through March 9. Upcoming exhibitions include group shows at Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, opening November 1, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opening July 2. Suh will also curate the Korean and Chinese collections at LACMA in June 2009.