Suh Do Ho explores home, space, memory, emotion, individuality, and collectivity through various media. His large fabric pieces visualize the relationships between individuals, collectives, and experiences. Suh earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. His works are featured in major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum.
INTERVIEW with Suh Doho
Q. Please tell us about the overall process of this project, in which Sanjeong Suh Seok’s two sons create a unique space, inspired by their late father’s artworks.
My brother and I grew up watching our father work. When he was working day and night to prepare for an exhibition, the entire family would join in support. As a child, I started out by grinding the ink stick to prepare his ink. As an adult, I helped by photographing him at work, filming documentaries, organizing exhibitions and publishing his catalogs. Naturally, I observed his work process from up close, and was given the opportunity to understand his world of art better than anyone.
Because my father was not particularly active in promoting his work and worldview, I have long felt the need to introduce his profound works and philosophy to the world, based on my own experience. This project was made possible by LG Electronics’ precious and timely proposal. In creating this project, I did not begin simply from a single motive, but undertook a non-linear process, considering many factors simultaneously in setting the direction and conceiving the work.
Q. What were the criteria for selecting the seven works by artist Suh Seok that will be shown for the first time at this exhibition? How do the traditional paintings, the new digital video work, and the space where they are presented, connect with one another?
My father created thousands of works during his lifetime. He and our whole family shared the understanding that his works from the late 1970s to the early 1980s were particularly important, as this was when the abstract human forms began to appear. But since the actual works were rarely introduced in Korea, we decided to take this opportunity to select some of the important works from that time, to reinterpret and share them with viewers.
CollaboratingCollaboration with my brother was an organic and intuitive process that considered many factors at once. It was a method of first putting on the table all the elements necessary to compose the exhibition, and coordinating them step by step. I believe this was possible because we were already on the same page with regard to many issues. The principle we set forth was that we would reinterpret Sanjeong Suh Seok’s world of art in a way that no one had ever experienced before, while utilizing the features of LG Electronics’ transparent OLED TV to the maximum.
What was important here was that we had been able to actually see these works being made. Based on that experience, we made a digital video (animation) series with the small works expressing the human figure in abstract form. Each short animation is a visualization of the process through which the human forms were created on the paper, based on our memories of our father channeling his energy to give life to his work, stroke by stroke.
Giunsaengdong (rhythmic vitality) is a core concept in East Asian art theory, and something that my father always emphasized. His painting was a continuity of movement, resembling a kind of performative art or qigong exercise, and his paintings were the results and traces of that movement. Therefore, based on our experience of standing by our father’s side and watching him paint, we added “movement” to the images with the hope that spectators would also be able to see Suh Seok’s world of art from a different perspective.
At the entrance of the exhibition venue, spectators first encounter a fabric installation representing the site-specific large-scale painting formerly presented at Maison Hermès, Tokyo in 2007. Through this work, they can experience the transparent and spatial aspects of my father’s paintings physically, or in analogue form. Next, they may feel the aspects of time and the sense of energy from LG’s transparent OLED TV. Such overlapping of diverse layers is not only an intuitive experience of the process through which a painting is made, but also demonstrates our hope to reveal that Suh Seok’s paintings are not stationary, but retain the element of “time.” That is to say, the paintings by Suh Seok seen and understood by my brother and me are paintings that are alive and moving, paintings containing “giunsaengdong” from the beginning. Illuminating this idea was the key objective of this project.
Q. In the process of your new interpretation and imagination of your father’s work, did you rediscover any enchanting aspects of his paintings, or of his work in general?
For this new project, we not only reviewed our father’s countless works in detail, but also spent many hours watching documentary films about him, and reading his analectsanecdotes. Looking back on the times we spent with our father, our final conclusion was that artist Suh Seok was an extraordinary, rare genius. While living in contemporary times, he made endless efforts to maintain an unsurpassed spiritual world, while achieving perfect harmony among poetry, calligraphy and painting. The world of art that came as a result of his attitude toward life was one of unfathomable depth, and we were once again astonished at the way he expressed that philosophical and spiritual world through the simplest lines. At the same time, I realized another charming aspect in my father’s work. When the “human” series was first presented in the 1970s, the images came across to people as groundbreaking and innovative; but even today, five decades later, I feel that these same paintings look new and innovative, and continue to carry contemporaneity. Thus, in our recent work, rather than newly interpreting our father’s world of art, it would be more appropriate to say that we are attempting to remove some of the “onion skins” from his works, which have countless layers of meaning.
Q. As an artist who uses delicate materials such as fabric to construct gigantic installations, what impressions did you receive, or what new possibilities did you recognize, with LG OLED?
First of all, the fact that LG OLED is a “transparent” display makes it novel. Since the beginning of humankind, images have been drawn on opaque materials. Especially in the case of European painting, pictures played the role of “windows” leading us into imaginary worlds, painted with thick layers of oil paint on opaque canvases. In that process, we fell into the “illusion” created by the image, without being aware of the ontological conditions that compose a painting, such as paper, canvas and paint.
Sumuk (Korean traditional ink and water painting), however, seems to have had a different perspective than Western painting from the very beginning. Unlike painting in the West, where the image exists only on the surface, in Korean traditional painting the image forms as it soaks into the paper. My father often mentioned the infinite cosmos and space of sumuk painting, and as I experienced the moment of the LG OLED screen becoming transparent, it seemed as if a sense of three-dimensional space was emerging on the two-dimensional plane. It felt like finally I was able to see the space behind the picture, which had not been visible for thousands of years. The semi-transparent fabric I often use is in a way similar to the transparency of the LG OLED in context, and thus I was able to begin the project while setting ‘transparency’ as one of the key topics.
Q. What do you wish to communicate to spectators who visit the LG OLED Lounge at Frieze Seoul 2024?
Our father and weus, his two sons, have each demonstrated a unique personality, but we are also powerfully connected through a shared aesthetic sense and values, in the way we see the world. This project was an opportunity to reconfirm our commonality, as I collaborated with my brother using our father’s works as the medium. The exhibition was organized to share with the world our special experience with artist Suh Seok. We have made great efforts to enable spectators to come closer to our father’s work through this event.
Q. We who live today try, through art, to estimate the future to come. What significance does technology have for an artist, and do you believe that past and present can be connected through technology and art?
After the recent pandemic experience, and as AI has entered the commercialization stage, I began to contemplate deeply on what significance my work will have in the future, as it deals with placeness site-specificity and spatial experience of the human body based in the three-dimensional world ruled by the force of gravity. Perhaps if technology advances to the state of realizing a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from reality, then a moment may come in which all forms of art limited by place must be reconsidered; however, I am not completely pessimistic. As the inventions of camera, computer and internet exerted tremendous influence on human civilization, yet took place in our daily lives, other types of new technology will also eventually be accepted without too much opposition.
Since contemplation related to “memory” is an important topic in my work, I do my best to ruminate on the fleeting past from today’s point of view, striving not to let go of those memories. Trying to hold on to memories is an act presuming a future based on the past, for which I feel the increasing need of technological assistance. Though I received traditional education in fine art, ever since my student years I have been very interested in new materials and technology. Though these works may be unfamiliar to the public, as I have had fewer opportunities to show them compared to the relatively better-known fabric installations, I have worked with digital technology since long agofor a long time, and am always searching for technological means to effectively realize my ideas. In my London studio, there are actually robots busily making works on their own, according to my simple instructions!
