My Country, 2003 - Do Ho Suh

Through architecture and narrative, South Korean artist Do Ho Suh's intricate sculptures and installations define and re-define the notion of identity and individuality, public and private space. Having moved from South Korea to the United States, Suh's investigation—and in particular the notion of "infinite movability" of space and unconventional notions of scale and site-specificity—developed around his personal experiences of cultural displacement and struggle with cultural identity.

These tensions—rootedness versus displacement and individuality versus conformity—are seen in seminal works like Seoul Home/L.A. Home, 1994, a transparent baldachin of silk shaped like a house suspended from the ceiling, a "house" that can be folded up and packed into a suitcase. Additionally, works like Floor, 1997—2000, where the small palms of hundreds of multicolored figures hold up a thick, glass platform; Who Am We?, 1996, where the tiny portraits of approximately 40,000 teenagers taken from the artist's high-school yearbooks are made into pixilated-looking wallpaper, the portraits only visible at close distance; and Fallen Star 1/5, 2009, a 1/5 scale model of a house the artist lived in Providence, Rhode Island, crashing into the traditional Korean house (called hanok) that the artist grew in, are also prime examples of materials, themes, and subjects in Do Ho Suh's œ“uvre to date. Read Less