Do Ho Suh – Perfect Home

Do Ho Suh – Perfect Home
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
November 23, 2012 – March 17, 2013
Through the artist’s re-creation of his private home, the place where his memories and experiences reside, “Do Ho Suh – Perfect Home” will demonstrate how, by traversing the differing territories of contemporary society, Do Ho Suh places people’s values in contrast and underscores their diversity.
Do Ho Suh was born in Korea in 1962. After graduating from Seoul National University, he relocated to the US in order to study painting and sculpture.
Suh sought to reflect in his artworks the discord he felt between the culture of the United States of America, where he lived as a racial minority, and his own Korean culture. He subsequently achieved worldwide renown with artworks displaying delicacy and precision, in the handling of materials, and simultaneously, qualities of ambiguity and suspension that resonate with the spirit of our times.
Suh’s lightweight artworks, which originate in his concept of “carrying a space in a suitcase,” are created using thin, translucent fabrics. In many cases, the fabric is modeled into the form of stairs, corridors, bridges, or gates and represents boundaries between inside and outside, and public and private. For Suh, who lives nomadically, appearing in exhibitions and projects around the world while maintaining bases in London, New York and Seoul, references to “home” are an extension of the inquiry into identity. His works are nevertheless two-sided, however, for his use of plain, monotone fabric erases the specific features of the “Do Ho Suh home,” so that someone’s possession becomes no one’s possession. Through a complete re-creation of Do Ho Suh’s original home, as well as new works adapted for the spaces of this museum, the exhibition will consider what “home” means to Suh. The same “home,” however, when placed in the specific context of Kanazawa, will take on new meanings. Viewers will thus have occasion to see how “home” changes in meaning, depending on its cultural context, and they will feel incentive, accordingly, to ponder what “home” means to them.