The work of Do-Ho Suh

We really like the work of Do-Ho Suh which recently got covered in the Best Contemporary Korean Artists article on Dazed Digital. The Korean artist was born in 1962 in Seoul, Korea, and received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations, Do-Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity. His work explores the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity. In 2001, Suh represented Korea at the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2012 Gwangju Biennial.

In the vision of the artist life is all about “moving through a series of spaces”. His love-hate relationship with uniforms (High School Uni-form, 1997), after an education of imposed conformity, also explores clothing as “the smallest, most intimate space that one person can carry”. Suh defies conventional notions of scale and site-specificity, as with his juggernaut suit of armor Some/one (2003), composed of 3,000 dog tags, whose mirrored interior makes it unclear where you end and the collective space begins.

One of his recent works is the highly impressive Karma: A Tower of Blinded Men Rising into the Sky (2013). The towering sculpture rises 7 meters into the sky and is installed in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The impressive piece depicts a tower of piggy-backed men, each successively covering the eyes of the man below him, creating an illusion that the blinded tower seems to stretch to infinity like a fractal, although technically it was made from 98 cast stainless steel figures.

Read more on the Best Contemporary Korean Artist on Dazed Digital.