Recently, Lucy Ives profiled Do Ho Suh MFA ’97, whose fabric sculptures conserve the texture of everyday life.
Ives writes: “Suh’s art is often described as a response to globalization… Suh was born in Seoul in 1962 and came to the US to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, where his work in fabric architecture was a way of addressing the ‘jet lag’ of spatial displacement and disorientation. As he tells me, he first measured his living space while a student in order to ‘clothe myself in the bedroom of my childhood’. He writes expressively of the ongoing nature of this project – what he terms the ‘accumulation of memory and experience at this point in my life’. ‘Home is what we carry with us,’ he maintains, seeing this fact as an ambiguous expression of the search for comfort in the face of dispossession. ‘I believe in the body’s profound ability to transport and move and adapt,’ he writes, ‘but I’ve only grown more conscious of the catastrophic consequences of being forced to leave your home and that is key to these questions. There are currently more than 80 million people in the world who have been forced to flee their homes. It is a cataclysmic crisis.’”
Read more of Ives and Suh’s conversation at this Frieze article.
Photo credits: Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home/L.A. Home, 1999, silk, aluminum armature, 378.5 × 609.6 × 609.6 cm, installation view, Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles (1999). Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London