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Gallery Exhibitions
Museum Exhibitions & Projects
Museum Exhibition
Mori Art Museum
Do Ho Suh + Po Po
July 25 – October 12, 2015
Artist Bio
Do Ho Suh
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Whitewall
Winter 2015
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Artforum
January 28, 2017
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The Art Newspaper
November 30, 2016
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Artnet News
March 12, 2015
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Artforum
February 2015
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Time Out New York
October 16, 2014
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designboom
October 5, 2014
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Art in America
October 2014
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Time Out New York
September 25, 2014
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Artnet
September 14, 2014
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Art21
February 19, 2014
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Baccarat
December 2013
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The Wall Street Journal
November 6, 2013
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Art Asia Pacific
Nov/Dec 2013
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Modern Painters (Asia Edition)
November 2013
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Ocula
November 2013
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Artinfo
May 8, 2013
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Sculpture Magazine Personal Histories: Do Ho Suh
November 1, 2012
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Sculpture
November 2012
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The Los Angeles Times
June 16, 2012
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The San Diego Union-Tribune
June 1, 2012
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ABC News
May 31, 2012
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Art Asia Pacific
April 30, 2012
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Wall Street Journal
April 24, 2012
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Designboom
April 4, 2012
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Harper's Bazaar
March 31, 2012
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The Korea Times
March 27, 2012
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Designboom
January 27, 2012
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MSNBC
November 16, 2011
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ARTnews
October 31, 2011
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Art in America
October 31, 2011
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Riviera
October 31, 2011
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San Diego City Beat
October 19, 2011
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The Seattle Times
October 13, 2011
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Seattle Met
October 11, 2011
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Flavorwire
October 9, 2011
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Surface
September 30, 2011
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Elle Decor
September 30, 2011
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Public Art
September 30, 2011
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NY Arts
September 30, 2011
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Huffington Post
September 30, 2011
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Frame Magazine
September 30, 2011
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Voice of San Diego
September 28, 2011
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New York Magazine Review
September 26, 2011
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Fast Co. Design
September 26, 2011
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New York Magazine
September 20, 2011
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Art in America
September 15, 2011
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Time Out New York
September 8, 2011
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Tate Modern
August 31, 2011
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Designboom
August 16, 2011
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Time Out Hong Kong
May 25, 2011
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W Magazine
October 31, 2010
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Art + Auction
October 31, 2010
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Artforum
May 13, 2010
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International Herald Tribune
March 30, 2010
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The Houston Chronicle Online
November 19, 2009
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Art in America
November 17, 2009
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Los Angeles Times Culture Monster Blog
June 28, 2009
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Los Angeles Times
June 24, 2009
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Los Angeles Times
June 21, 2009
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Artdaily.org
May 18, 2009
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Surface Design Journal Winter 2009, Volume 33, No. 2
December 31, 2008
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Icon Issue 065
October 31, 2008
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ArtAsiaPacific
June 30, 2008
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ArtInfo
June 30, 2008
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Artforum
May 31, 2008
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The Guardian U.K.
May 28, 2008
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Art in America
March 1, 2008
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NYTimes
November 29, 2007
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Vogue Living
November 1, 2007
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Artforum
November 1, 2007
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Artforum
February 1, 2007
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Designboom.com
January 18, 2007
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Sculpture
December 1, 2005
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Tema Celeste
September 1, 2004
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Architectural Record
September 1, 2004
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Washington Post
April 25, 2004
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Galleria Soledad Lorenzo Catalog Text
January 27, 2004
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Art in America
November 1, 2003
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Interni
October 1, 2003
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Tema Celeste
September 1, 2003
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Art Asia Pacific
September 1, 2003
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Time Out New York
July 3, 2003
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Artforum.com
July 2, 2003
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New York Sun
June 26, 2003
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Village Voice
June 23, 2003
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New York Times
June 13, 2003
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Art AsiaPacific
March 1, 2003
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Tema Celeste
July 1, 2002
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Artforum
January 1, 2002
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Sculpture
October 1, 2001
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Tema Celeste
January 1, 2001
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Art in America
November 1, 2000
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New York Times
September 29, 2000
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The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San Diego Union Tribune
June 01, 2012
Do Ho Suh's ‘Fallen Star’ lands at UCSD: Newest addition to Stuart Collection explores the meaning of home
By James Chute
Do Ho Suh had fun considering the idea:
A small, displaced house stuck to the side of a building like some sort of parasite, both separate from and dependent on the larger structure.
And the highly regarded Korean artist enjoyed putting together a proposal and sending it to Mary Beebe, the founding director of the Stuart Collection, UC San Diego’s remarkable assemblage of sculpture and installation art.
“But I never thought that it could be realized,” Suh said.
“My attitude was like, what the heck? Let’s see how it goes. Because if you start to think about the practical stuff — like, how is something going to be realized? — you would never make something interesting.”
Beebe, however, saw the potential in that small, seemingly out-of-place house. Seven years later, in an effort supported by $1.3 million in private donations, Suh’s extraordinary installation, “Fallen Star,” officially opens Thursday.
While the Stuart Collection has already earned an international reputation for its 17 previous works and includes several pieces that have become campus icons (especially Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1983 “Sun God” and Tim Hawkinson’s 2005 “Bear”), “Fallen Star” may be the collection’s crowning achievement, and not just because it’s the most expensive and technically complex work Beebe and project director Mathieu Gregoire have ever installed.
Whether seeing it from a distance impossibly perched at the top of the Jacobs’ School of Engineering or experiencing it seven stories up from the inside, where everything in its comfortably furnished single room seems precisely in place and dangerously out of kilter at the same time, you immediately get it.
“One of the reasons the experience of this work is so amazing — besides the disorientation one feels and has to adjust to — is the attention to detail which is true of all Do Ho’s work,” Beebe said. “And just the sight of it is so unexpected from the ground and from the seventh floor window (when you exit the elevator).
“Maybe he has created a new and intensified, but in some ways familiar, experience for us all: That, ‘Whoa, where am I?’ ”
Home away from home
Displacement has been a central theme of Suh’s work ever since he left his native Korea and came to the U.S. in the early ’90s. His art, which has been exhibited worldwide from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Tate Modern in London, is informed by his initial alienation, disorientation and longing for home, whatever home is.
“That’s my question,” Suh said. “Since I left home to come to the states, these (artworks) are all part of my quest to find out: What is the meaning of home? What is home? It’s a way to find the answers, through the projects.
“And each time I’m about to complete a project, I realize it was not the answer. So I move on to the other ones.”
When he first moved to Providence, R.I., to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (“Fallen Star” is inspired by a house close to where he lived), an uneasy Suh wasn’t so much concerned with making art as he was with adapting to his environment. He started to explore and understand the space around him by taking measurements with a tape measure, even if the translation from meters to inches was just another reminder of the many differences between his old home and his new home.
Upon graduation, he moved to New York, where he was equally uncomfortable living in Manhattan. As he continued his measurements, he started to wonder if there was a way to re-create the space he felt comfortable, his home in Korea, in New York.
“It was not really an art project at the beginning,” Suh said. “I was thinking, how can I bring my home in Korea” to New York?
His house in Korea was larger than his apartment, so there was no way to make it fit. But after leaving New York to earn a graduate degree at Yale, he found a solution. An award from the Korean Cultural Center brought with it an exhibition in Los Angeles and enough space to re-create his Korean house in fabric (an idea inspired by the mosquito netting that had been common to him while growing up). The installation traveled widely and included a stop in New York, where Beebe saw it.
“When I came across Do Ho’s work in the late ’90s ... it was this house, the skin of a house, actually, floating in the sky,” said Beebe. “It was a replication of the house he grew up in, because he had come to this country ... and he felt like he had been dropped from the sky. He had to completely readjust his whole outlook.
“It seemed to me that could be really, really significant — the idea of home, or displacement, for a campus where many of the students have left their homes for the first time.”
Beebe asked Suh to submit a proposal to her and the Stuart Collection’s advisory board, and he was enthusiastic about the possibility of creating something that would be a “real” house, not just an imitation made of fabric. And he welcomed the opportunity to work on campus.
“With (the project’s) contrast between domestic and private space versus institutional space, the campus would be the ideal sort of setting,” Suh said, “because I didn’t want to make something that’s not relevant to the site. I’m not interested in making beautiful sculpture that can go anywhere. I wanted to make something that is relevant to UC and San Diego and addresses the issues of the people who live here.”
“It was like, ‘YES’!”
Secret garden
His approved proposal, however, was for the side of Urey Hall, whose occupants had security concerns (as visitors would have to walk through the labs to reach the house) and asked Beebe to find another site. Suh, Beebe and project director Gregoire finally settled on the roof of the engineering building, with the enthusiastic blessing of the department, and Suh reconfigured his original proposal to allow the three-quarter scale house to jut off the building’s roof. He also incorporated a garden that had been part of one of his earlier, alternative proposals.
“The garden has its own life,” said Suh, who has specified some plants that are not native to California, and like the house, may seem out of place. “It will evolve over time. I don’t know how it’s going to do because it’s high up there and some plants may die. But hopefully, it will (flourish) and create something almost like a secret garden that is completely different from the rest of the campus.”
Although the house was constructed on the ground and lifted to the top of the engineering building in November, it’s taken another six months to furnish the house and install the garden. “Fallen Star” is among Suh’s most “permanent” works, but the garden ensures an element of impermanence.
“That’s an important part of the project,” Suh said. “I’m not interested in a sculpture that’s sitting somewhere forever. I want something that changes. I don’t think there’s anything permanent. We think that things are permanent and we try to make things permeant, but I don’t think there’s anything like that in this universe.”
Given the engineering involved, however, and house’s steel and concrete infrastructure, “Fallen Star” is going to be up there for the foreseeable future, affecting generations of viewers.
It has already affected Suh.
“We now know these kind of things can be done,” he said. “And we can push a little bit further.”
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