1. Introduction
Greetings.
Welcome to the Do Ho Suh exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
With works found in cities around the world, including Seoul, New York, and London, Do Ho Suh is well established as a leading South Korean installation artist.
This large-scale solo exhibition explores Suh’s artistic practice, shaped by his distinctive visual language over the past three decades.
For this artist who grew up in Seoul but has mainly worked abroad, personal movement has been a process through which different cultures, languages, systems, and communities have intersected, collided, and overlapped. For Suh, a home is not merely a fixed building set in a specific place. It is a sensory space that moves with the body, carries memories around the world, and connects a person’s experiences with those of others. His conception of home is not something unique to those who cross borders, like Suh. Every day that we open our doors and step outside, we, too, become nomads as we leave the familiar behind and adapt to a different world. Suh’s work has a universal resonance, and he is internationally recognized among the prominent artists of our time.
This exhibition includes previously unseen early works and drawings. They offer a glimpse into the questions he explored and the experiments he performed at the beginning of his career, while also demonstrating his playful imagination. The exhibition presents a broad selection of Suh’s works, including some of his most recent pieces, as it traces how his ideas have shifted and expanded over the last thirty years. It is hoped that it will prove to be another milestone along Suh’s journey as an artist who continues to evolve and create. It is also hoped that it will become a space where our questions intersect and intertwine with each other’s and, ideally, a home where the memories and questions of each of us can linger.
The works in this exhibition are not organized according to theme. Instead, the exhibition arranges the early and later works, drawings, and installations to reflect on and expand upon the concepts of home and the body and of space and time within a cohesive context. As you move through the web of relationships Suh has woven among these concepts, you can take a moment to add your own memories and experiences to what you encounter.
