Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by London-based artist Do Ho Suh. Working across various media, including sculpture, drawing, photography, and film, Suh engages ideas of home, memory, psychic space, and displacement. In this exhibition, Suh expands on his exploration of the politics and subjectivity of memory, a concept that has remained central to his practice over the last 25 years.

Suh has long been interested in the role of public monuments, first explored with Public Figures (1998) and particularly in what he refers to as the “self-authorizing framework” of the pedestal. The presentation opens with Inverted Monument (2022), a large-scale sculpture made of extruded thermoplastic polyester developed as part of an ongoing research project with a robotics team at the Centre for Print Research, UWE Bristol. Combining robotic and analogue techniques, this project arose over the course of the pandemic and demonstrates the artist’s interest in questioning the authority and agency of the artist’s hand. Intricately rendered, tangible yet diaphanous, Inverted Monument draws on generalized concepts of an “ideal” monument based on the lexicon of Western statuary and the power structures it upholds. The requisite commemorative figure is positioned upside down within the body of a classically proportioned pedestal, the top of the figure’s head grazing its base. Here, Suh redirects the viewer’s gaze from the top of the pedestal to its very bottom, turning the logic of the public monument on its head and challenging what and who we choose to elevate in civic spaces.