Creative grounds for the team working to produce SCORCHED by Wajdi Mouawad, directed by Soheil Parsa, at the MIWSFPA of Brock University in the autumn of 2024. Designed by David Vivian.
Born 1962 in Seoul; lives and works in London, New York, and Seoul.
“I consider migration to be a process,” says Do Ho Suh “not something that happens overnight. Each step of the process is like crossing another threshold.” Impressions of space, environment, and home are central to Suh’s art, which explores a poetic language for memory through materials and architecture. His fabric sculptures depict rooms, thresholds, and passageways from the artist’s former living spaces constructed with diaphanous polyester, whose translucency evokes the nature of memory. They are painstakingly sewn in one-to-one scale, with doorknobs, molding, and outlets crafted in precise detail. The works shown here represent two spaces from the artist’s childhood home in South Korea: the entry and eating area. He imaginatively links places he has lived, reconfiguring memories of home in the present.
"Internationally renowned artist Do Ho Suh works across various media to produce drawings, films, and sculptural works that explore notions of memory, displacement, individuality, and collectivity. Suh is widely known for his fabric sculptures that reconstruct former residences in Seoul, Rhode Island, Berlin, London, and New York. Suh is interested in how the body relates to and inhabits space, particularly domestic spaces, and how the concept of home can be represented through architecture.
In this film, LACMA curator Meghan Doherty and SCI-Arc faculty member Kavior Moon speak about Suh's 348 West 22nd Street, a recent anonymous gift to the museum. This sculptural work is a full-scale fabric replica of the artist's former ground floor apartment in New York City. Constructed out of polyester and stainless steel and made using traditional Korean sewing techniques and digital modeling tools, 348 West 22nd Street collapses notions of the interior and exterior, private and public, while also memorializing the artist's desire to hold onto memories of home."
Do Ho Suh: Fallen Star - Stuart Collection
Do Ho Suh’s work explores the notions of home, cultural displacement, one’s perception of space and how one builds a memory of it. What is home, after all? A place? An idea? A sentiment? A memory? A small cottage has been picked up, as if by some mysterious force, and “landed” atop Jacobs Hall at UC San Diego, where it sits crookedly on one corner, cantilevered out over the ground seven stories below. A lush roof garden of vines, flowers and vegetables, frequented by birds and bees, is a small gathering place with panoramic views of the campus and beyond. Upon entering the house it becomes apparent that the floor and the house itself are at different angles, causing a sense of dislocation – some would say vertigo. One must adjust both physically and mentally in order to accommodate a whole new view of the world. The surroundings are familiar but the feeling is not. [2/2022] [Show ID: 37823]
In this era of mass migration, and amid ongoing debates about it, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists respond to the migration and displacement of people worldwide.
