Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea

Do Ho Suh

Museum of Fine Arts

Houston

Nov 21, 2009–Feb 14, 2010November 21, 2009–February 14, 2010

Installation of Do Ho Suh at Museum of Fine Arts

Houston, TX

The MFAH is the second and final venue for the first major museum exhibition in the continental United States in almost two decades to focus on contemporary art from South Korea. Organized by the MFAH and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea features a generation of artists who have emerged since the mid-1980s—some well-known and others on the brink of such recognition—all of whom work on the cutting-edge of international art trends and within a distinctly Korean context: Bahc Yiso, Choi Jeong-Hwa, Gimhongsok, Jeon Joonho, Kim Beom, Kimsooja, Koo Jeong-A, Minouk Lim, Jooyeon Park, Do Ho Suh, Haegue Yang and the collaborative, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Your Bright Future (a deliberately ambiguous title taken from a sculpture by Bahc Yiso) represents each artist through a large-scale installation or substantial body of work, including site-specific installations, video art, computer animation, and sculpture. Christine Starkman, MFAH Curator of Asian Art, is organizing the presentation in Houston.

Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, Seoul, Korea; lives and works in London, United Kingdom) works across various media, creating drawings, film, and sculptural works that confront questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity. Suh is best known for his fabric sculptures that reconstruct to scale his past and present homes and studios in Korea, Rhode Island, Berlin, London, and New York.

Suh is interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical forms, and examines how the body relates to, inhabits, and interacts with that space. He is particularly interested in domestic space and the way the concept of home can be articulated through architecture that has a specific location, form, and history. For Suh, the spaces we inhabit also contain psychological energy, and in his work he makes visible those markers of memories, personal experiences, and a sense of security, regardless of geographic location.