Do Ho Suh on ‘homecoming,’ a coat that made him cry and a house in the void

[INTERVIEW]

A month before the largest exhibition of his life opened in Seoul, Do Ho Suh, one of the most widely shown artists active in the international art scene, put on a coat and started crying.

Somebody was filming. The footage is on display at the exhibition.

From the outside, the coat seems bland, made of dark wool and nothing else. Inside are pockets cut from the clothes of his father, the late renowned painter Suh Se-ok, who died in 2020; his mother; his wife; and his two daughters — each pocket holding something its owner used to carry. It was built for Suh by RE;CODE, a label that makes new garments out of discarded ones, for a project called “Memory of Love.”

“My hand was going into an enormous energy field as I put it on,” Suh told the Korea JoongAng Daily during an interview at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), days before the opening of the “Do Ho Suh” exhibition. Suh says he was ill for days after putting on that coat.

“You could say it happened because I was emotional, but I don’t think that’s the right expression. It was an experience I had never had before.”

Suh has spent more than three decades making objects out of the places and garments that have touched him, and the coat is the point at which he himself became the audience for one.

Suh, 64, is one of Korea’s behemoth contemporary artists, and the works that made him so are architectural — translucent, one-to-one-scale replicas of every place he has lived in and out of Korea, sewn from fabric. They have been installed at the Venice Biennale, LACMA, the Smithsonian and last year at Tate Modern.

The MMCA exhibition, which opened last Thursday and runs through February next year, beats any of his previous shows in scale. Suh gave the Korea JoongAng Daily two hours in the galleries of the MMCA last Monday, a conversation that covered decades of his personal story, why he thinks a Korean house may now read as foreign in Korea and what he means when he says the perfect home is a void.

The smallest space you can carry

Suh, born and raised in Korea until moving to the United States after graduating from university, was in a uniform for most of his early life — from school to the army — and the work at the MMCA that joins 10 of those uniforms together is not really about those institutions. It is about a problem he has carried for decades.

“They say all the cells in your body are renewed every seven years,” Suh said. “So the body I had seven years ago and this body are completely different bodies, but the consciousness is the same. You still think of yourself as ‘me.’ How that is possible is something I’ve been asking.

“It isn’t only the shell or exterior. The whole body changes, the insides, too — so how is it that I feel and think that I’m me? That’s what has always interested me.”

Suh describes himself as a visual artist whose job, in his own words, is to lay bare the question — to make it visible for others to see. So he did.

In 1991, he made “Metal Jacket,” a military jacket liner covered in 3,000 dog tags, as a sculpture module at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). It sits at the MMCA in a section labeled “seedbank.” Suh’s account of what a piece of clothing is has not changed since: clothing is the smallest personal space you can carry.

“A house or a piece of clothing touches our body heat, our body, directly,” Suh said. “Clothing especially wraps around the body. If there were a machine that measured energy, it would be the object with the most of it soaked into it.”

He was not speaking in the abstract. Raising two daughters, Suh found he could not get rid of any of it — the toys, the clothes, the shoes.

Shoes hold the most because they take a person’s entire weight, which is why Suh thinks Koreans will hand down other clothes but won’t share shoes. Suh used the Korean word for “footprint,” the mark a life leaves behind.

“Clothes are similar to a house. We don’t always live in a new one. Sometimes we live in a house somebody else has lived in.”

The room with nobody in it

Nearly every work Suh is known for, including his fabric architecture, was made through collaboration with others from years when he was living alone. His world view changed dramatically when he had a family.

“I sat in the middle of a small apartment and had a conversation with the walls, with that space,” Suh said. “There is nobody between that room and me, and the result of that solitude with the space is my fabric work. Once I had a family, my relationship to physical space changed because my home was where they were.”

After the solitary artist married, his elder daughter was born in London, and someone filled the space he had once had to himself. He and his wife decided early on to keep everything the two children wore and played with, without any idea what it was for. The boxes took over his studio in about five or six years.

Those clothes from Suh’s children are stacked now like the rings of a tree — cardigans in one column, leggings in another, ordered smallest first, so that you are looking at years of growth in cross-section at the MMCA show. Beside them are casts of the space between his hand and each daughter’s hand, taken as the hands got bigger, in colors the girls picked themselves.

Some of his most recent works show a much more personal and private part of his life, if possible.

It did not start in America

Suh left Korea in his late 20s, after his military service, and the account of his career that followed him back has irritated him in some way.

“Until recently, everyone always spoke about my practice as if it magically started when I arrived in the United States,” he said. “That’s quite frustrating, because many of my key lines of inquiry can be traced to Korea.”

At RISD and Columbia, fellow students told him his paintings were derivative of American Abstract Expressionism, a movement he says he was not influenced by at all. He was still working through traditional Korean painting.

“It was a bit of a shock — the lack of knowledge around other visual cultures,” he said, referring to his fellow RISD students.

That misunderstanding, perhaps, has led to some of the unique forms of art now on display at the MMCA. Several of the forms of his thread sculptures were generated in Grasshopper, a plug-in for the 3-D program Rhino, into which Suh feeds simple instructions.

Suh has spent decades questioning artistic authorship, and taking his own hand off a phase of fabrication is one way to do it.

“Ironically, that came out of Eastern painting. In Eastern painting, there are cases where the picture does not get painted the way the artist intends.”

Ideas arrive like a bolt of lightning for Suh, and the only way to catch one is to draw it very small — shown through 16 of his own sketchbooks that caught them.

“I’ve carried the same size and brand of sketchbook since the early 1990s. I actually see them almost more as film stills than drawings. They’re very much in motion for me, and they circle through the books and around my head, often recurring a decade later when I've forgotten all about their predecessors.”

A house that has become foreign

The new show at the MMCA “feels like a homecoming,” Suh reflected.

“Back to the city of my birth. The city, in some ways, I’ve never mentally left, but the city that doesn’t exist for me in the way it did when I left. Not just because it has changed, but because I don’t think you can ever return to exactly the same place.”

The hanok (traditional Korean house) in Seongbuk-dong that Suh has been reproducing — in silk, in fabric, through graphite rubbings — is 10 minutes from the MMCA by car and is where he actually lived when he was in Korea. He had come from there to the museum on the morning of the interview. Suh does not expect the work to be straightforward, and not for sentimental reasons.

“Koreans know it very well as a hanok, as a traditional Korean house, but hardly anybody has actually lived in one. It might feel foreign, even to Koreans.”

On whether coming “home” to Korea had settled the out-of-context feeling he has described having since childhood, Suh said it had not. It had made it worse. (He was rather cheerful about this.)

Which leaves the question of why the houses work on strangers at all.

“How many people get to build a house in the design they want and live in it?” he asked. “Everybody lives in a space that has already been built. Rented, leased, whatever. So the elements in these different places are familiar to a lot of people.”

The cheapest available refrigerator in a student apartment; the same doorknob at the same height, in a building nobody chose.

“My own work is uncanny to me every single time I see it,” Suh mused.

The perfect home is a void

Near the end of the MMCA show is a model of a project Suh has been circling back to since the late 1990s, in which a bridge joins the cities he has lived in, with a house sitting at the midpoint. What he is after is a “perfect home” with no geographical or cultural distance, one that transcends the limits of time and space.

The first version was a triangle strung between Seoul and New York and, later, London. In the sketchbooks, it keeps going until it closes into a circle. But what he has arrived at is not a house.

“‘Perfect Home’ isn’t the physical space of the London home, the Seoul home, the New York home,” Suh said. “It’s a void from which you can see those houses all at once. If you’re standing at the center, you can see all of it.”

What he likes, he added, is omnipresence — which requires getting out from under space and time altogether.

“I am not an architect, but someone who lives in the spaces architects have made and thinks about them.”

In the same exhibition space are scale models of every space he has occupied, set out together. Visitors see them one at a time. He sees all of them at once, “through a void” set in the center of the different scale models — and there, really, is where the “perfect home” is for him.

The coat he most recently made for the MMCA show and cried while putting on is now on display at the show, so he has not been able to put it on again.

“If I go on to the next world, so to speak, I would like to wear it once more.”

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]