Do-ho Suh

Se-ok Suh modeled one building after the main quarters and library of a civilian-style home King Sunjo built in 1878 in the palace garden, and Suh constructed their home using red-pine sourced from the palace complex when many of the palace buildings were dismantled.

Suh's version was later used as a model for the redecoration of the original palace home.

After failing to get the necessary grades to study marine biology, Suh applied to Seoul National University (SNU) to study Oriental painting.

Do Ho Suh (Korean: 서도호, Hanja: 徐道濩, b. 1962 in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation, and drawing.

Suh is well known for re-creating architectural structures and objects using fabric in what the artist describes as an "act of memorialization."

After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Seoul National University in Korean Painting, Suh began experimenting with sculpture and installation while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1985 and Master of Fine Arts in 1987 from SNU, and completed the mandatory military service in South Korea before moving to the US to study at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1991.

Suh applied to RISD, which was the only American art school that accepted him, in order to move to the US with his first wife, a Korean American graduate student.

Suh felt a sense of relief in the US: moving away from Korea allowed the artist to build his career outside of his father's shadow.

Although Suh had completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies in Korea, RISD had the artist enroll as a sophomore.

Suh attributes his turn to sculpture to artist Jay Coogan, whose course on figuration Suh took when he first started at RISD.

This led Suh to create sculptures in the corridors of the school.

His artistic interventions focused on these overlooked spaces and drew out their relationship with the people who regularly traverse them.

Suh also took courses on pattern-making at the RISD that allowed him to develop the foundational skills he needed to work with fabric.

Architecture has been a key reference for the artist since the mid-1990s—even for pieces like Floor (1997-2000) that do not resemble buildings.

As a result, Suh pays particular attention to the site-specificity of the work, and sensorial experience of the viewer engaging with his pieces while moving in the exhibition space.

A number of his sculptures produced in the past few decades consider the possibilities for sculpture to become architecture, and vice-versa.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from RISD in 1994, and went on to Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1997.

He graduated from RISD with a BFA in 1994.

In 1994 he produced a smaller-scale piece—Room 515/516-I/516-II—using muslin in order to see if it was possible to create a large-scale fabric house.

Suh again turned to this reference to Korean high school for his 1996 installation High School Uni-Forms that show sixty school uniforms connected together, and later in 2000 for Who Am We?

The Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles commissioned Suh to create the installation, leading him to begin exploring the question of home through his work.

Suh came up with the idea while he was living in New York in the 90s reminiscing about his childhood home.

Suh continued studying sculpture at Yale University, and graduated with an MFA in 1997.

While at Yale, Suh met Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Tiravanija later helped launch Suh's career in New York.

Upon arriving in the US, Suh began measuring spaces in the many new surroundings he went through, and experimenting with altering them.

For this temporary installation at RISD, Suh added a laminated birch panel to the floor of a hallway, and a long curved rod that passerby had to walk through in order to get down the hallway.

Suh overlapped images of students from high school yearbooks to create the two computer-generated color photographs.

His blurring of the line between sculpture and architecture often renders architectural structures portable through material change, as exemplified by one of his most famous works Seoul Home...(1999), for which he recreated his childhood home using polyester and silk.

Suh's use of fabric and paper functioning like a "second skin" make it possible for his pieces to be folded up and transported.

His material choices of rice paper, and fabric commonly found in hanbok also refer to traditional Korean art and architecture.

Suh was born in Seoul to Se-ok Suh, a famous Korean ink painter, and Min-Za Chung, one of the founders of Arumjigi-Culture Keepers (재단법인 아름지기), a non-profit organization supporting the preservation of Korean tradition and heritage.

Their family home was composed of five contemporary and traditional structures.

He was able to realize the full project in 1999.

Suh regularly shows his work around the world, including Venice where he represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.

He practiced for over a decade in New York before moving to London in 2010.

In 2017, Suh was the recipient of the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts.

Suh currently lives and works in London.

Suh's work focuses on the different ways architecture mediates the experience of space.