February 16, 2022

Installation art has a history in modern and contemporary art practice as defying the object-oriented conceptualisations of Western art. The use or evocation of fabric in sculptural installations becomes an interesting point of contact to consider the materiality of media and their manipulative nature that defy perspectival nature. Fabric has been used across various cultural traditions and geographic locations to imbue matters of historicity, culture, myth, media and more. 

South Korea, Seoul . Samcheongdong, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the work Home within Home by Do Ho Suh (Photo by google)

One of Korean fabric artist SUH Doho(~1962) is sculptor and installation artist. Over the course of his career, he has lived around the world in cities including London, New York, and Berlin. His idea of home has long guided Do Ho Suh's artwork. Openly constructed in airy fabrics and translucent resin architecture, these dreamlike sculptures signify time, memory, and identity, as much as physical settings. Artist speaks about the complexities of reflection, cultural worlds that have inspired his work, and why home always means far more than spaces where we live. 

He is working for his artwork in the studio (Photo by art21)

This artist, in interaction with various local craft traditions, techniques, dialogues, and narratives, uses monumentality as a ploy to defy the very nature of perception, that which is learnt as well as accepted naturally. He brings to light a variety of cultural techniques that question the very objecthood within art production, with the conception of the installation art history as occurring between the interstices of material flows.

I try to understand my life as a movement through different spaces.” - Do Ho Suh