Do Ho Suh

press release: The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) presents an exhibition of work by renowned Korean-born sculptor and installation artist Do Ho Suh, on view from February 11 through May 14. An MMoCA Nights opening reception will take place on Friday, February 10 from 6-9 pm, featuring an artist talk by Do Ho Suh. Internationally acclaimed for meticulous, mesmerizing sculptures and installations that relate to his personal experiences of Eastern and Western cultures, Suh crafts evocative works that reflect ideas of home, identity, and personal space.

Do Ho Suh’s work draws on the artist’s personal experiences growing up in Seoul, South Korea, studying art in the US, and moving homes several times over the course of his life. He now lives a global and “nomadic” existence, with homes in New York, London, and Seoul, and an exhibition schedule that reflects this, taking him all over the world. Inspired by his personal history and biography, the artist’s sculptures and installations reveal a range of powerful themes, including notions of public versus private space, global identity, memory, and displacement. At the same time, Suh’s works strike viewers with their delicate monumentality, subtle beauty, and intricate construction techniques. This distinctive combination of technical skill, striking visual appeal, and universal resonance has led to both critical and public success for the artist.

Do Ho Suh will transform MMoCA’s main galleries into a realm of transparency and light. Central to the exhibition is a life-sized installation of fabric rooms and passageways that replicate the artist’s New York apartment and studio space at 348 West 22nd Street. Suh created each of the three installations—Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2011–2012), Corridor and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011, USA (2011–2012), and Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2014)—from swaths of luminously colored polyester fabric held together by a subtly incorporated stainless steel armature. Combined and presented together, this three-part architectural recreation allows for the public to wander through an ephemeral, dreamlike representation of a piece of the artist’s personal history, rendered in blocks of translucent color that at once conceal and reveal the details articulated within.

Specially constructed for the exhibition, a self-enclosed room built in the back of the gallery offers a dark and intimate space to view works from Suh’s Specimen Series—a body of work that replicates in exacting detail everyday domestic appliances and fixtures, such as a refrigerator, stove, bathtub, and toilet. Contained in light-filled Plexiglas boxes and made from translucent fabric over steel frames, the sculptures emit a ghostly glow in the darkened space. Also in this space is Secret Garden – 1 (2012), a 1:16 scale model and related animation of Suh’s Korean house and garden being moved via semi-trailer truck to Madison Square Garden. In addition, two giant rubbings made by Suh of the inside of his 348 West 22nd Street apartment flank the gallery walls. Where the fabric sculpture offers a spatial experience that approximates Suh’s residence and studio, the rubbings provide exact details of the apartment’s surfaces and fixtures. Nearby watercolor paintings and thread drawings symbolically examine the figure in relation to buildings and homes. On view in the Imprint Gallery, MMoCA’s dedicated multimedia gallery, behind-the-scenes documentaries reveal the artist’s unique processes to create diverse works over the past ten years.

Do Ho Suh was organized by The Contemporary Austin with additional support by Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong. To date, generous funding for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art presentation of Do Ho Suh has been provided by Ellen Rosner and Paul J. Reckwerdt; Sylvia Vaccaro; Peggy and Tom Pyle; Sara Guyer and Scott Straus; Mary Ellyn and Joe Sensenbrenner; Nancy Doll and Michael Bernhard; Kit and Phil Blake; Hooper Corporation and General Heating & Air Conditioning;  J.H. Findorff & Son Inc.; JoAnne Robbins and David Falk; Gabriele Haberland and Willy Haeberli; a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts; and MMoCA Volunteers.

_______________________

Hours at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art are Tuesday–Thursday (noon–5 pm); Friday (noon–8 pm); Saturday (10 am–8 pm); and Sunday (noon–5 pm). The museum is closed on Mondays.

more events:

Drop-In Tour:  Saturdays, February 11, April 8, May 13 • 1–1:30 pm: Drop by MMoCA for lively and informal discussions of MMoCA’s newest exhibition, Do Ho Suh. Led by MMoCA’s docents, Drop-In Tours are free, 30-minute guided tours that provide you with the tools to consider artists’ creative decisions and construct meaningful interpretations of their work. Meet in the museum lobby.

Gallery Talk: Arijit Sen, Friday, February 24 • 6:30–7 pm: The Alien in Our Midst: Memory, Displacement and the Making of Milwaukee’s Everyday World. In response to themes explored in Do Ho Suh, Professor Arijit Sen will discuss engagement between the human body and its surroundings, as a way to understand the contemporary architecture of migrants. Embodied place-making helps us discover how the contemporary immigration and global movement of people has shaped the everyday world around us.

Arijit Sen is an architect and vernacular architecture historian who writes, teaches, and studies urban cultural landscapes. Currently an associate professor of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with an honorary appointment with the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Sen cofounded the multi-campus Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures area of doctoral research on cultural landscapes.

Gallery Talk: Jung-hye Shin, Thursday, March 9 • 1–1:30 pm: Home: Lost & Found (in Korea). Professor Jung-hye Shin will discuss how buildings embody cultural assumptions and mold our ways of thinking as a result of our everyday movement thought the spaces we inhabit, and further explore how transnational movement of architectural practices and technology reshaped such relationships in the context of modern Korean history.

Jung-hye Shin is an associate professor in the Design Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses primarily on creative positive place experiences in residential homes and in public buildings by examining practical and symbolic aspects of the built environment.

MMoCA Nights,  Friday, March 17 • 6–9 pm: Poetry and Performance: A Response to Do Ho Suh. This MMoCA Nights gathering will continue to probe the Do Ho Suh exhibition. At 6:30 pm, art historian Michael Jay McClure will discuss the intersections of space and time in Do Ho Suh’s work. At 7:30 pm, enjoy poetry readings and live music from the Madison Symphony Orchestra Rhapsodic Quartet in the galleries, developed in response to the exhibition. The evening is free for MMoCA members and $10 for non-members.