Do Ho Suh: Almost Home
As I was sitting in the design building working on my newspaper posts, Deb Scott, Associate Professor of Teaching at tOSU, gave me a piece of paper with a quote from Do Ho Suh printed on it and told me he's one of her favorite artists. So, I decided to read about his work.
Excerpts from Do Ho Suh: Almost Home (2018)
Do Ho Suh’s immersive architectural installations — unexpectedly crafted with ethereal fabric — are spaces that are at once deeply familiar and profoundly alien. Suh is internationally renowned for his “fabric architecture” sculptures that explore the global nature of contemporary identity as well as memory, migration, and our ideas of home.
Suh was born in Korea and moved to the United States at the age of 29 in 1991, and he currently lives between New York, London, and Seoul. He crafts his works using traditional Korean sewing techniques combined with 3-D modeling and mapping technologies. Suh sees these works as “suitcase homes,” so lightweight and portable they can be installed almost anywhere.
His works transform the familiarity of a domestic space into a liminal one, where ‘home’ is both an idealized concept and physical reality. Through these spaces, Suh examines how home and identity are ever-evolving concepts in today’s global society, and how culture, tradition, migration, and displacement intersect as we construct our ideas of selfhood and origin.
Humans tend to feel a sense of entitlement over state parks, but in reality, the parks are homes to many creatures. I would say those creatures should be the ones to whom the parks belong. I would also say that the park belongs to itself. The trees and plants that make up the park are living, too, and they (the trees and plant and animals) all depend on each other. They are home there, and they make it home. What Do Ho Suh does is make us see homes in a different way, look at them from a different perspective and reevaluate what a home is and means to us. I wonder if (and how) I could do something similar with state parks: get people to see them as the homes they are, not for us but for the plants and animals that inhabit them.
Resources.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. (2018). Do Ho Suh: Almost Home. Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/suh
No generative AI was used in the creation of this post.
