Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, Seoul, Korea) currently lives and works in London, New York, and Seoul. Suh originally studied oriental painting in Seoul National University before moving to the United States in his late 20s to study painting and sculpture in Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. Since the mid-1990s, Suh has questioned the conventional notion of personal space and explored the variable dimension and mobility of this idea in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations. Suh’s full-scale “homes” of semitransparent cloth, including the traditional Korean house (hanok) of his childhood and his apartment in New York, explore basic human values and overarching themes of home, family, tradition and origination. Through these works he examines the place where one spends life’s moments and how that space consequently nurtures one’s identity. By recreating personal structures into something easily movable and detachable, Suh questions the boundaries between public and private space, between a faraway birthplace and a current abode, and between the land of memories and actual places.
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