Architectural settings and abstracted figures inspired by the artist’s biography serve as the central tenets of Do Ho Suh’s practice, highlighting the porous boundary between public and private space as well as notions of global identity, space, nomadism, memory, and displacement. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Suh is informed by his personal experiences in his work, particularly his move from South Korea to the United States in 1991, as well as the specific domestic spaces where he has lived, including his childhood home (a traditional hanok-style Korean house), a house in Rhode Island where he lived as a student, and his apartment in New York. Transparency, or the oscillation between opacity and visibility, appears throughout much of the artist’s work, evoking the layering of space and intermediate areas in Korean architecture. The figure also looms large, waiting in the wings, appearing throughout his work in abstracted or symbolic forms. Suh first began rendering domestic structures in 1994, an impulse turned into life’s work. These have been manifested, on one hand, in iterations of large-scale house sculptures—also riffs on his past and present family homes—variously bisected to show their interiors, teetering precariously atop or wedged between structures, or displayed in a gallery as if they have crashed through the ceiling, cast down by Dorothy’s tornado. Suh also weaves transparent structures made of monochrome polyester, at once luminous, architectural, and ephemeral, inviting viewers to wander through their dreamlike interior passageways (which might be replete with toilets and light switches). These transplanted homes are playful and imaginative but also deeply melancholy in their manifestation of disorientation: as impressions of the many residences in which Suh and his family have lived, they testify to the global and poignantly elusive nature of “home” as seen through the artist’s eyes.

For The Contemporary Austin, the artist renders a multipart installation for the Jones Center and Laguna Gloria exploring these themes, combining existing work with newly commissioned aspects and including architectural structures, documentary films, and drawings and related models. On the first floor of the Jones Center, Suh has created a dark, intimate room of light box objects from his Specimen Series, including a radiator, refrigerator, stove, and toilet, adjacent to a Secret Garden model and animation. The video room contains a behind-the-scenes series of documentaries showing the artist creating work over the past ten years. Upstairs, the viewer enters a realm of transparency and light, the centerpiece of which is the series of rooms and passageways from Suh’s 348 West 22nd Street apartment complex and studio where he lived in New York City, the final unit created and shown here for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition, representing closure for the series. Complementing the downtown installation, Suh has refabricated Net-Work on the newly installed floating barge at the base of the amphitheater on the grounds of the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria. Inspired by the fishing nets in a traditional Japanese seaside village, where Net-Work was first installed, the shimmering, kinetic piece invites viewers to walk into its luminous embrace above the water. Absent didactic narrative but ripe with evocative content, Suh’s poetic works ask viewers to consider the definition of home: what it means, how it feels to have a home or be without, and the way in which we carry our past, present, and future dwellings around with us for the entirety of our lives. - Heather Pesanti, Senior Curator

Do Ho Suh Exhibition Support: Alturas Foundation, Agnes Gund, Christopher Hill, Korean Air, The Moody Foundation, Linda Pace Foundation, The Moody Foundation, Meryl and Andrew B. Rose

Jones Center

700 Congress Avenue
Austin (TX) 78701 United States
Tel. +1 (512) 4535312
info@thecontemporaryaustin.org
www.thecontemporaryaustin.org

Opening hours

Tuesday - Saturday from 11am to 7pm
Sunday from 12pm to 5pm

Laguna Gloria

3809 West 35th Street
Austin (TX) 78703 United States
Tel. +1 (512) 4588191
info@thecontemporaryaustin.org
www.thecontemporaryaustin.org

Opening hours

Tuesday - Sunday
From 10am to 4pm

Related images
  1. Do Ho Suh, Net-Work, 2010. Gold and chrome plating with polyurethane coating on ABS plastic and nylon fishing net. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
  2. Do Ho Suh, Apartment A, Corridor and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2011–2012. Polyester fabric and stainless steel tubes. Apartment A, 271 1/3 x 169 3/10 x 96 7/16 inches. Corridor and Staircase, 488 3/16 x 66 1/8 x 96 7/16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
  3. Do Ho Suh, Net-Work, 2010. Gold and chrome plating with polyurethane coating on ABS plastic and nylon fishing net. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
  4. Do Ho Suh, Apartment A, Corridor and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2011–2012. Polyester fabric and stainless steel tubes. Apartment A, 271 1/3 x 169 3/10 x 96 7/16 inches. Corridor and Staircase, 488 3/16 x 66 1/8 x 96 7/16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
  5. Do Ho Suh, Specimen Series: Toilet, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2013. Polyester fabric, stainless steel wire, and display case with LED lighting. Edition of 3. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
  6. Do Ho Suh, Corridor and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2011–2012. Polyester fabric and stainless steel tubes. 488 3/16 x 66 1/8 x 96 7/16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.