In Korean, the phrase which means “homesickness” is derived from “nostalgia”, linking melancholy with a particular place in a single’s reminiscence. For these within the Korean diaspora, this expression typically yields an acute consciousness of how they relate to their ancestral properties, producing double selves — anchored in each current and former lands — and prompting ideas about different potential realities.
Multidisciplinary Korean artist Do Ho Suh, eliding distinctions between the doable and unimaginable, earnestly entertains flights of fancy with out regard for his or her perceived plausibility. This started throughout his days as an artwork scholar learning portray on the Rhode Island College of Design within the US within the Nineteen Nineties, when he discovered himself interested by his household’s residence in Seoul and speculating how he may “take architectural area, which is meant to be motionless, and produce it some other place”. Wanting again on it now, he says, “For me, it was an enormous leap.”
Within the many years since, Suh has earned widespread approval for his sculptural strategy to this seemingly far-fetched thought. Utilizing light-weight translucent material, he creates precise replicas of the areas he has known as residence over time, which might then be folded up and transported on the artist’s whim.
This theme — the disconcerting pairing of risk and actuality — runs by means of Suh’s present exhibition, Speculations, at Artwork Sonje Heart in Seoul (even when there aren’t any material properties). Right here, the London-based artist unveils an array of fashions that make clear his working course of and idea improvement for much more incongruous concepts.
“I took the ways in which architects current their tasks — plans, drawings, texts, maquettes and generally animations — and that’s the way it began,” he says after we meet in a conventional Korean home within the grounds of Artwork Sonje Heart. “However what has adopted is that a number of the ‘speculations’ have truly been realised.”
Amongst these are properties and dwelling preparations that seem out of sync with their environment: a conventional Korean home wedged mid-air between two fashionable buildings (“Bridging Dwelling”, 2010, Liverpool), one other precariously perched atop a high-rise house (“Fallen Star”, 2012, San Diego) and a totally useful resort room mounted on the again of a transferring van (“In Between Resort”, 2012-2015, Gwangju). At Artwork Sonje Heart, they’re introduced as maquettes alongside movies that doc their accomplished states, connecting Suh’s former goals to their bodily manifestations.
Different concepts are nonetheless in progress. “I by no means work linearly,” he says. “I all the time have so many issues happening concurrently.” One among his most protracted tasks started with a fee from Public Artwork Fund in New York to create an outside sculpture for the 2008 exhibition Past the Monument. His proposal was an empty plinth being carried throughout a big plaza by a phalanx of toy-soldier-sized figures — a transferring monument. Attributable to security issues, Suh in the end settled on a stationary model, “Public Figures”, though he by no means gave up on his authentic imaginative and prescient: “I’ve simply been ready to seek out the chance.”
For Speculations, Suh seized on the possibility to carry this concept one step nearer to actuality, producing a 1:6 scale mannequin with miniature figures whose legs transfer in unison, enabling the entire construction to roam round a squat pedestal in the course of the gallery. “Till you see one thing in motion, it’s onerous to imagine,” he says, confessing that he has been “quietly working” on methods to mobilise a full-size model of the work in hope of sometime seeing it come to fruition.
The analysis course of is commonly extra significant for Suh than truly realising his speculative proposals. “A Excellent Dwelling: The Bridge Challenge” (2010-12), for instance, wish to hyperlink his former properties situated in Seoul and New York by bodily means. Collaborating with architects, biologists, physicists, theorists and industrial designers, Suh got down to design an immense, liveable bridge that would stand up to the ocean’s currents and winds with out being swept away. “It’s a ridiculous thought,” he concedes, “however I take it severely. As soon as I’ve the concept that I wish to join these cities, then I’m actually invested in it and attempt to discover each answer to make it occur, a minimum of on paper.”
Suh’s latest replace for this exhibition added a 3rd terminus to the hypothetical bridge: his current residence in London. “The Bridge Challenge” (2024) triangulates the midpoint of all three cities in a distant location within the Arctic sea, prompting Suh to discover new prospects for sustaining life on this inhospitable local weather. To that finish, he teamed up with Korean outerwear model Kolon Sport to develop a prototype survival swimsuit — “Excellent Dwelling SOS (Smallest Occupiable Shelter)”, 2024 — able to withstanding the area’s excessive circumstances for as much as per week. He says, with emphasis, “I’m always wanting into new applied sciences. And, you realize, I’m ready.”
Whereas Suh’s speculations could also be criticised as quixotic conceptual workouts, he adopts a sombre tone when describing the underlying motivation for such experiments. “All these tasks, they really come from the final word concern of not figuring out issues,” he says. He feels conflicted when inserting himself into theoretical situations that he finds each fascinating and unsettling. “You’re thrown into this case and also you’re attempting to outlive, however you don’t know precisely the way you’re going to do it, or the place you’re going to finish up.”
Venturing into uncharted territory is a continuing in Suh’s speculative considering. It entails a level of vulnerability that manifests within the exhibition’s catalogue, facsimiles of the artist’s sketchbooks that he has stored since his days in Rhode Island. Though the tough concepts and intimate drawings that fill these pages have been by no means meant to be proven to the general public, he determined to share them out of concern that “individuals solely see what’s within the present, and so they don’t actually see issues in between. However for me, it’s one steady follow, on a number of ranges.”
To November 3, artsonje.org
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