Research sharing space #1: on contemporary Korean artists Do Ho Suh and Haegue Yang (EN)

small preface to this: I've been thinking a lot about all the research that gets done and never shared. In my case, the format of that is academic research for essays, which just seemed to evaporate after handing in the finished product. So I decided to go back into some essays I wrote for uni and pull out artworks, artists and ideas that I would like to revisit and start having conversations about again. Not really with any thesis or argument necessarily, just as means of exploring curiosity and sharing the process of diving deep into any given topic and unpacking it.

This is the first piece in that style, where I share some of the research I did into two fascinating Korean contemporary artists: Do Ho Suh (b.1962) and Haegue Yang (b. 1971)

Left: Do Ho Duh, Staircase V (2003), part of Staircase series, polyester fabric and stainless steel

Right: Haegue Yang, Mountains of Encounter (2008), aluminum venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire rope, moving spotlights, floodlights, cable © Haegue Yang, Photo: Museum Ludwig, Šaša Fuis, Cologne

I got into their work through writing an essay where I was asked to discuss the work of any two Korean contemporary artists, no restrictive brief, topic, theme... just that. I was interested in Haegue Yang from seeing Tate Modern room and to me her work had a visual parallel to Do Ho Suh, who I got to know from lectures. Getting into very rudimentary research, I realised the connection was deeper than aesthetic: both artists have reacted to the moment in Korean history when globalisation echoed in the local art world and, each in their own peripatetic existence, found creative strategies to explore their own experiences of displacement and constant circulation within a globalised art world. Below, we'll go through some context, focus on each of the artists separately in a bit more depth, and then explore points of connection between them.

Some Context

Since the 1990s, Korean society and culture have undergone dramatic change, including the complete democratisation of South Korea and rapid economic development. The government's liberal international travel policies allowed Koreans to circulate more intensely abroad and experience global visibility, while foreign influences to grow more present in Korea as well. This more direct involvement of Korea in the dynamic of globalisation led to discussions about the interplay between ideas of national identity and the exposure to other cultures from its now accessible international networks. The local art scene was impacted by this , growing a vibrant contemporary art history that has projected itself internationally. As art historian J. P. Park describes it: “the globalising momentum in Korea has never slowed and the innovations by its artists over the last few decades unequivocally point to mutual feedback between globalisation and the arts”.

Focus on: Do Ho Suh

Born in South Korea, Do Ho Suh relocated to the US to pursue artistic education and went on to live New York, Seoul and London; consolidating a successful career as a Korean artist on a global scale – which included representing Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2018.

While critics have viewed the artist’s exploration of the theme of displacement in connection to his geographical trajectory, Suh has also discussed a general “feeling of constant displacement”.

Do Ho Suh with his work at museum Voorlinden

Photo: Antoine Van Kaam

As he tells it, against the mainstream norm of tearing down traditional houses in 1960s/70s Korea, he lived in a hanok (traditional Korean house) at the time – an experience he described as “living in a time capsule”. Here, not only does he convey the feeling of spatial and temporal displacement, he also alludes to the importance of the structure of a home in marking this experience. The home as both an idea and a physical construct has indeed been central in his work, as architectural structures he inhabited, or features of them, were reconstructed in his sculptures.

Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home, 1991

In works such as Seoul Home (1991), the artist created a duplicate of the hanok he lived out of silk, following the actual dimensions of the original. Recently, the artist has also explored constructing “proportionally exact replicas of dwelling places, architectural features, or household appliances” from “stitched planes of translucent, coloured polyester fabric” (Victoria Miro descriptions) – which he called Hubs. The translucent material give the works a dream-like appearance, invoking the visual experience of a memory that is both not fully concrete and permeable to outside experiences. Because of their textile-like quality, these works are foldable and portable, easily packable in the artist’s suitcase as he travels between continents.

Do Ho Suh, Hubs: Bathtub, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2013 (top left) | London Apartment, 2015 | London Studio: Boiler Room, 2015 & detail of Passages photographed by pienw (top right)

For the artist, this reflects his idea that all space is “transportable and translatable” (in interview with Jayoon Choi, 2012) and his understanding that his pieces may lose and gain new meaning as they are brought around to new locations – much like the process of individual adaptation to new environments. In critical terms, this characteristic of his work has been discussed by Park as a “reinvention of site-specificity” and as a “nomadic practice which accommodates constant relocation”. The idea that artistic practice can accommodate relocation relates to how Do Ho Suh renames works as he brings and displays them around the world, adding each new location of installation to the title of the work. For instance, when he installed Seoul Home (1999) in Los Angeles, the work was called Seoul Home/LA – and so on for Seoul Home/New York and Seoul Home/Kanazawa.

Do Ho Duh, Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, 2014, polyester fabric, metal frame (left) | Visitors look at Do Ho Suh's site-specific work Home Within Home at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in Seoul. Photo Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Image (right)

Also in tune with his idea of space as repeatable and transportable, the artist creates other works in which different spaces, such as that of a home, are brought together, their boundaries blurred by nature of the fabric's transparency. In 2014, the artist created Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, an installation in which the replica in fabric of his Korean home is contained by a reconstruction in the same material of the apartment building he moved into when relocating to the United States, in Rhode Island.

Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star, 2012, University of California San Diego’s Stuart Collection

Another sculptural exploration of the idea and structure of a home can be seen in Fallen Star. Here, a generic Korean traditional house collides against a rectangular Western-looking building, specifically the University of California San Diego’s Stuart Collection. In this work, the external unsettling appearance of the house extends to its interior, where the floor and the house itself are at different angles, promoting what the UCSD Stuart Collection website calls a sense of dislocation. There is contrast between unfamiliarity of shock between this crooked home with the building and the familiar ‘decoration’ of this as a common common home, including a “garden of vines, flowers and vegetables” outside and a fully furnished inside. Details of the house furnishing allow Suh’s personal experience to permeate the work, as he includes family portraits of his own family. While this work highlights his personal memory much like his textile homes, Fallen Star also introduces an element of shock, chaos or disparagement between two worlds as opposed to a peaceful coexistence between them in a dream-like atmosphere (as we see in Home Within Home…etc.).

Focus on: Haegue Yang

Yang was born in South Korea and began her studies in Seoul, later on moving to Germany. She worked across a wide range of media, from collage to performance, but her installation works were my focus here. Similarly to Suh, Yang explores themes around movement and displacement. She features her nomadic lifestyle at the core of her practice, which operates between Seoul, Berlin and “other temporary jaunts in the international art world”, as Wes Hill (2018) puts it. The artist has engaged with a vast range of artistic references (often directly referring to the work of Western artists) but also with the realities of working beyond regional boundaries.

Haegue Yang, Apollo Magazine

In a recent work currently displayed at the Tate, Yang “explores the history of conceptual art shaped by a set of rules”. Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three is titled after the set of rules used by Yang in her reinterpretation of LeWitt’s 1968 Structure with Three Towers, a floor-based sculpture which she reproduces in Venetian blinds and suspends upside down from the ceiling. The work is an example of Yang’s frequent “references to various moments of abstraction throughout art history”, in which she clearly references works by canonical abstraction artists in her own manner – but notably without any articulation of a process of ‘Koreanisation’ of them.

Haegue Yang, Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three, 2015 (left) | Sol LeWitt, Structure with Three Towers, 1968 (right)

In Sol LeWitt Upside Down... (2015), Yang creates a transient environment “for the viewer to walk around, through and under” (Tate website). The artist’s use of Venetian blinds started with her Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Blind Room (2006), at the São Paulo Biennial themed ‘Como Viver Junto – How to Live Together?’ and can be seen in many artistic creations since (see below). Her use of the material evokes memories of the domestic environment, but also allude to a sense of permeability to the outside world – which can also be said of Suh Do Ho’s translucent constructions. In both cases, the nature of the materials provides a sense of ambivalence, in which there is both a separation from and a connection with the outside world to varying degrees.

Haegue Yang: Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Blind Room, 2006 (top left) | Mountains of Encounter, 2008 (top right) | Series of Vulnerable Arrangements –Voice and Wind, 2009, at the Guggenheim NY (bottom left and right)

Often, Yang couples the blinds with other objects typical of the domestic environment such as fans, as is the case of her Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Voice and Wind (2009, figure 8), displayed at the Guggenheim, New York. As the museum’s description of the work points out, such materials are “unfettered from their mundane roles, engaged as elements of an artwork meant to provoke subjective associations by bringing the private into the public realm” (Guggenheim website). This practice of “dissociating materials from their original contexts” (ibid.) is recurrent in Yang’s oeuvre, repeatedly putting into question one’s expectations of place-specificity, be that of domestic objects outside the home environment, or in her recreation of different locations’ constructions, as is the case here:

Her The Intermediates series is comprised of replicas of the Russian mosque Lala Tulpan (left), the Indonesian temple Borobudur (middle), and a Mayan pyramid-like structure (right), Yang reconstructs different cultural symbols in artificial straw to focus on the dispersion of materials and crafts, the latter often associated with ideas of place-specificity (i.e. local crafts).

Yang’s installation environments create immersive experiences for viewers, whose movements shift and inform the perception of the work. In the case of her Venetian blind structures, the experience of walking through or under sculptures allows light to enter through the pieces differently (Tate website). In works such as Cittadella (2011), this element of immersion and movement was given an added sensorial dimension as Yang included moving spotlights and scent emitters (Choi 2015).

Haegue Yang, Cittadella (2011)

Some points of connection

Taking up the theme of viewer experience of artworks, there are many points of connection between Yang’s and Suh Do Ho’s approaches. In their immersive installations, both artists invite viewers to inhabit or move through their constructed structures, allowing a performative and reflexive engagement with the artworks, to raise questions about one’s interaction with spaces, as well as with others.

Do Ho Suh, Passage/s, installation views, museum Voorlinden, 2019

In his more recent Passage/s , Suh produced a walk-through configuration of his Hubs. By combining these in-between spaces into a single structure in which one lingers while constantly ‘in passing’, Suh explores “transient experience[s]” (Victoria Miro website) and a “current state of fundamental flux” (Bae and Dimitriadis 2015, p.315). In addition, in Yang’s use of familiar domestic materials or in Suh’s creation of a feeling of nostalgia through the allusion to own personal memories, both artists invite viewers’ “personal projections” into the perception of their artworks.

Do Ho Suh, Bridging Home, 2010, photo by Susan Collins

Another point of comparison between Yang and Suh is their approach to cultural difference, in this case established between one’s origin and one’s context. As Park (2013) puts it, in contrast to Suh’s anchoring of Seoul “as his artistic emotional and creative origin”, Yang has “de-localised her origins” (Park 2013, p.521). While Suh’s works depict distinct worlds symbolised by different architectural structures, that either collide as in Fallen Star, exist one within the other as in Home Within Home..., or are shown distinctively as in Seoul Home, Yang dissolves the boundaries of specificity and promotes a merger of distinct cultural universes. When creating her own versions of the works of Western artists, for example, the artist does not articulate a rhetoric around the dichotomy between two cultures, and seems to approach either cultural system as her own, regardless of origin. In that sense, it is possible to suggest that she takes on – or perhaps performs - the idea of ‘global citizen’ or of ‘transnational identities’, so often echoed about 21st century displacements.

Haegue Yang, Tracing Movement, 2019, installation shot at South London Gallery

Furthermore, the feeling of struggle with “the transformation of his personal Korean identity in the face of the unstoppable assimilation into the mainstream of American culture” identified by Hwa Young Caruso (2008) in Suh’s work is absent in Yang’s. This has been seen by Park (2013) as “symptomatic of recent changes in Korean art” (p.513), which include a progressive disengagement with identity politics by Korean artists, and identifiable here even with only a slight time difference between the start to the lives and careers of Suh and Yang.

Haegue Yang, Handles, 2019, installation shot at the MoMA

This can be observed when contrasting their different approaches to the mobility of artworks within a global art scene and market. In the case of Suh Do Ho, while the works do not “fit common museum practice or private collecting” and pose questions about the possibilities of curating within transnationality, the possibility of folding and easily transporting the structures makes them compatible with the idea of displacement, linked to his personal trajectory. In Yang’s case, her discussion of mobility (both hers and her pieces’) as an artist working on a global scale does not include any feature of her position as a subject, or allude to a feeling of “nostalgia and romance of the struggling outsider” (Park 2013, p. 513) – often evoked by Suh. The clearest example of this is her Storage Piece (2004), in which the artist displayed her works still wrapped and packaged since their last display, as a creative strategy to deal with having nowhere to store them. The works have also been shown in “a gradual process of being unpacked at exhibitions in Los Angeles, Houston, and other locations” (Choi 2015, here).

Do Ho Suh, New York City Apartment/Corridor/Bristol, 2015. Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

To sum, while there has been widely recognised difficulty on the part of critics in defining Korean artists from the 1990s onwards (especially considering their lack of organisation into groups with defined agendas) perspectives like Park’s, Bae’s and Gregs’ helped me establish parallels between artists and identify shared trends. Chief amongst these is a recurring exploration of a theme summarised by Park as “the rhetoric of identity, diaspora and exile, and a sense of nostalgia” (p.512), evident in both Suh’s and Yang’s trajectories and careers.

I'll leave you with some links on other works by each artist to look into, because both have gone beyond the mediums/series explored here and it's definitely worth checking it out:

Do Ho Suh