Do The solo exhibit by this South Korean artist is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Arts at the Santa Fe Depot building in San Diego. It is on display from March 18 to July 14.
Do Ho Suh was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1962, and has lived a nomadic life, moving from Seoul after completing his Masters and Bachelors in Fine Arts in Oriental Painting at Seoul National University to study in the U.S. at the Rhode Island School of Design. Now Mr.Suh has homes and studios all over the world, including New York, London, and Seoul. This lifestyle has deeply inspired the way he has thought about his sense of place in the world. The concept of home is the central idea to this exhibit, and his work more broadly challenges conventional thoughts on home and sense of place.
Walking into the the spacious exhibit hall with tall white walls topped with a high metal framed ceiling, you will be confronted with a Mr.Suh’s New York apartment in full scale occupying a large area of the exhibition hall. It is covered in light primary colors and semi transparent fabric stretched around a stainless steel frame that is used to create the structure of the work. Details down to the fire alarms and the stove top burners are accurate.
The semi transparent fabric that makes up the surfaces create a hierarchy and gives it weight while at the same time making it seem as though it could disintegrate at any second, leaving the exhibition hall empty as if the whole exhibit was never there.
Stepping inside the room next to the main hall, it is pitch black, harsh white light eminates out of large glass boxes that display a series called “Specimens.” These boxes contain various fixtures of a house like a refrigerator and a bath tub made up in the same way as the apartment was created, with all white fabric stretched tightly around stainless steel frames.
The process of creating this work involved Doh Ho Suh and friends laying sheets of paper over every surface of his New York apartment and coloring the edges in blue to create dark lines and light surfaces. Then this is cut out to create a large template that is used to create the frame. These large sheets are hung on the wall in the exhibit hall opposite from the apartment, which allows the viewer to see the process of how it was created.
Along with this, a collection of work was displayed in which he uses paper embedded with cotton thread, colored brightly to contrast the white paper.
The exhibition is free to go to for those 25 and under and general admission is $10.
