During the 1950s and 1960s, as Korea was modernizing in great haste, many of its old buildings were thoughtlessly torn down. Do-Ho Suh's father, the artist and scholar Suh Se-Ok, built a traditional scholar's house out of the discarded wood from a demolished palace building. Gate is a full-size rendering in silk of one of the gates to Suh's parents' house in Seoul. The original is constructed with a deliberately low arch, so that one must bow upon entry to the complex. This promotes a self-awareness that begins in the viewer's body, and instills humility.
Born in Seoul in 1962, Suh lives in New York but spends much of his time in Korea, where his art is fabricated. As an émigré to the United States, he has had a strong desire to make the essence of home portable, and is concerned with how one constructs and is constructed by public and private notions of space. Architecture remains a central metaphor in his work, which reflects the condition of the artist in a globalized world, where rapid movement across continents is an essential and common part of life, making space, time and culture seem porous.
Suh began making "fabric-architecture" in 1994, using filmy, translucent materials like silk and nylon to create ghostly and fragile works that evoke home, homesickness and the sense of loss that is intrinsic to memory. He has rendered his living spaces in Seoul and New York, as well as more temporary residences in Los Angeles, Baltimore, London and Seattle, all in delicate fabrics. Transparent or translucent, his fabric pieces meld inside and outside, personal and public, past (the childhood home) and present (his adult apartment), making seeming opposites inseparable. Suh is preoccupied with issues of identity, but retains a strong sense of the collective over the personal.
