Research Statement

Research Statement

 My research project focuses on Do Ho Suh a Korean sculpture artist. He was born in Seoul, Korea in 1962. After earning his BFA and MFA in Oriental Painting from Seoul National University, and fulfilling his term of mandatory service in the South Korean military, Suh relocated to the United States to continue his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. Kwon, Miwon said in 2002:"He is interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations; Do Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity." His work tend to express the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity. In blog the majority researches are about his achievement in the sculptures.

            When I got the artist list, I was thinking whom I would pick to do the research. I was searching their works online and trying to find a person I interested. Then, I found Do Ho Suh, his amazing works and the beautiful colors he used attracted me a lot. It is unbelievable to finish the huge art works. I like the comparison method and the repetitive method he used in his works. There are some examples I want to explain below:

            For the work “Staircase” and the “Home with Home”, I like the special materials that he used and the beautiful bright colors he represented. Staircase is based on a staircase and floor in Suh's landlord's apartment. From the description by David winton bell gallery: "fabricated in vibrant red nylon, Staircase is visually striking. Not quite touching the floor, the staircase extends down from a blanket of red that Suh associates with the floor of the space above. The work shadows the viewer." For the home with home, viewers can enter and walk through the apartment, find the fireplace and bookshelves, the stove, refrigerator, and sink, and the light switches, sockets, doorknobs, and locks. His architecture illustrates how our memory of space affects space itself.

            For the work “Floor” and “Public Figures”, both of the two works used the comparison method and the repetitive method. He used his miniature figures to support a heavy stone pedestal in the “Public Figures”, and also use the miniature figures to form a huge screen with their bodies in the “Floor”. As an audience, by looking at his works, I can feel the human’s power from the little figures. Especially, when he put the little figures and the huge stone or huge screen together. I can’t image how long he has taken for finishing the art works. In one words, there are really the amazing art works.

            For the work “Karma” and “Cause and Effect”, he continues to use the repetitive method in his works. From the description by Albright-Knox Art Gallery: "Karma, a twenty-three-foot-high, monumental bronze sculpture, reflects the monumental and elegant in the precarious tower of crouching human figures stacked one upon the other." Besides, “’Cause & Effect’ evokes a vicious tornado. This vast ceiling installation is a composition of densely hung strands that anchor thousands of figures clad in colors resembling a Doppler reading stacked atop one another,” said Do Ho Suh, adding that the artwork is a “physical realization of existence, suggesting strength in the presence of numerous individuals. The work is an attempt to decipher the boundaries between a single identity and a larger group, and how the two conditions coexist.” Through the great details and the repetitive method he used, he represented the monumental and elegant style in his works.

            Except doing some research of his achievement of the sculptures, I also doing the research of his education schools and the definition of sculpture, the style of modern sculpture and the history of the materials that the artist used for their sculpture works. According to wikipedia:"Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard material as well as the softer materials." However, Cece Evans represented: "the modern sculpture tended to share interests in abstraction, materiality and questions of form. Modern sculpture heralded a range of new materials and new techniques, from monumental factory-made steel sculptures to plastics. Modern sculpture thus displays multiple and diverse approaches and ideas." For the materials used in sculpture are diverse, changing throughout history. Besides, Do Ho Suh graduated in the famous art schools, the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University, also finished the BFA and MFA in Seoul National University is also the famous school in Korea. That reminds me have a good education and hard work in the college are the important element of being success.

            In conclusion, it was a great experience putting this little research blog together. I learned a lot about the sculpture by doing the blog. Also, it is great to have a chance to understand the famous artist Do Ho Suh and his works. As an Asian studying in the U. S, by looking at his works, I can find some common thinking from his ideas. It is amazing processes to spend the time and do the huge projects; his enthusiasm of the art is worth for us to learn.

Mid-term assignment

My artist’s of choice’s name is Do Ho Suh. He was born in Seoul, Korea in 1962. After earning his BFA and MFA in Oriental Painting from Seoul National University, and fulfilling his term of mandatory service in the South Korean military, Suh relocated to the United States to continue his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. Kwon, Miwon said in 2002: “He is interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations; Do Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity.” His work tend to express the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity. So in this blog, I will focus more on his achievement in the sculptures.

Considering his background, he left Korea in 1991 to distance himself from his father’s established reputation as a painter and to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. After arrive New York, he found himself longing for his native home and unable to sleep. Much of his art is an attempt to express the feeling of missing his home. Such as one of his show called Home Within Home at Lehmann Mauplin Gallery in New York, his works examined the concept of home and attempts to explain what it means to identify with a place. That is also represented the cultural displacement and cultural identity.

Secondly, his colorful sculpture works and the special materials that he used for his work attracted me at the first. I was surprising of the simple beautiful color arrange and the complex fancy huge works. For example, one of his works named Floor, from the description by Indianapolis Museum of Art: "It is closer examination, and these a revealed to be the small palms of figures assembled below the floor. Hundreds of multicolored men and women crowd together with heads upturned and arms aloft. The collective strength of this Lilliputian group supports the weight of individual visitors who step up onto the floor grid." That is a huge project; it’s hard to think about how long he needs to make it.

His achievements also represented in his work’s exhibition. His works have influenced over the world. According to his own website: "He represented his works in numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Tate Modern, London, UK, Artsonje Center, Seoul, Korea, and the Mori Art Museum."

In conclusion, Do Ho Suh is really a grateful artist. It was hard for a foreigner artist stand in the U.S, especially in the worldwide. I am glad to continue to do the research of his works and understand more about him. Also, it is a wonderful visual process to appreciate his works.

Modern Sculpture Art History

Modern sculpture arose in tandem with similar artistic trends in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Like artists working in other media, sculptors of the modern era tended to share interests in abstraction, materiality and questions of form.

Modern sculpture heralded a range of new materials and new techniques, from monumental factory-made steel sculptures to plastics. Modern sculpture thus displays multiple and diverse approaches and ideas.

History

• Scholars argue over the time period and definition assigned to the term "modernism." However, many begin the modern era with the Realist movement of the 1850s, exemplified by the works of the painter Gustave Courbet. Realist artists concerned themselves with then-contemporary social issues and strove to represent the here and now rather than grand historical themes and idyllic countrysides.

  In the early twentieth century, artists began to investigate questions of form and representation. Form refers to the artwork's appearance, which includes questions of size and scale, volume, line, shape and color. Representation is what an artwork symbolizes, what it means. While many sculptors played more and more closely with pure abstraction (when an object does not represent anything but itself), others like Duchamp played overturning common perceptions of everyday objects.

  Most scholars end the modern era in 1945, at the end of World War II. However, many artists continued working with modernist concerns of form and material for decades afterwards.

Auguste Rodin

• Modernism often signifies a break with the past and a celebration of the new. Though many consider the sculptor Auguste Rodin as the father of modern sculpture, Rodin upheld traditional artistic conventions. He sought training in French art academies (though remained mainly self-taught), respected the academic art tradition and firmly emphasized craftsmanship.

  Rodin's expressive style, frequently realist subject matter and ability to render deep psychological states clashed with the trends in figure sculpture of his day. Academic sculptors of the mid-to-late 1800s created smoothly surfaced monuments usually depicting a particular allegory or moral, with finely detailed decorative elements. Rodin dispensed with idealized figures and allegorical subjects, creating figures of living people with deep emotion, as in his late-career "Monument to Balzac" of 1891-98.

Pablo Picasso

• Revolutionary in painting and printmaking, Picasso also fundamentally changed sculpture in the early 1900s. In 1911-1913, Picasso created the first collage "Still-life with Chair Caning," which incorporated drawn and collaged elements. In collage, Picasso interrogated notions of art-making and representation: instead of drawing chair caning, Picasso simply applied a wallpaper printed with a wicker pattern (commonly used to paste on chairs and tables for decorative purposes). Not only a representation of something else (wicker), the wallpaper was also inarguably itself--a revolutionary approach when more traditional artists concerned themselves with accurately rendering an illusion of the natural world.

  When Picasso began making sculptures from bent and assembled pieces of metal, this again signaled a major change in sculptural practice. Instead of carving stone and wood or modeling clay, Picasso constructed a sculpture from disparate parts. This began the modern sculptural technique of assemblage (also called "construction").

Marcel Duchamp and the Readymade

• In 1917, Marcel Duchamp bought a men's urinal, turned it upside down, signed it "R. Mutt, 1917" and submitted the urinal to a New York exhibition run by the Society of Independent Artists. Though the Society's board (of which Duchamp was a member) purportedly made the exhibition open to any artist submitting work, the board rejected the urinal. Duchamp immediately resigned, without identifying himself as the creator of the object, calling the Society's board hypocritical and not truly modern.

  With the urinal, titled "Fountain," Duchamp claimed that art comes from the artist's idea, and not the mind: a factory-made product can be "art," if an artist calls it such. Duchamp began a series of "readymades," his term for sculptures constructed from found objects, and began a tradition that artists continue to work with.

Constatin Brancusi

• Differing from Picasso's constructions and Duchamp's readymades, Constantin Brancusi continued to work with traditional sculptural techniques of carving and metal-casting. Brancusi's interest in form as well as his simple and elegant abstractions have made him a prominent figure in art histories of modern sculpture.

  Brancusi arrived in Paris from Romania in the early 1900s. By 1908 Brancusi mainly worked with "direct carving," a process where the artist takes a block of stone or wood and carves into without preparing with sketches or preliminary clay figures. For Brancusi, direct carving more closely connected the artist and his psychological state with the material and artwork itself. In his "The Kiss" (1916), for example, Brancusi carved two figures embracing from a single block of stone with a series of incised grooves. "The Kiss" emphasizes the physical and emotional closeness of the couple through its material.

Read more: Modern Sculpture Art History | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_6586136_modern-sculpture-art-history.html#ixzz1fWwVeQ5q

Materials of sculpture through history

The materials used in sculpture are diverse, changing throughout history. Sculptors have generally sought to produce works of art that are as permanent as possible, working in durable and frequently expensive materials such as bronze
Bronze figure of Robert Burns by Henry Bain Smith, 1892, above Union Terrace Gardens, Aberdeen, Scotland

and stone: marble, limestone, porphyry, and granite. More rarely, precious materials such as gold, silver, jade, and ivory were used for chryselephantine works. More common and less expensive materials were used for sculpture for wider consumption, including glass, hardwoods (such as oak, box/boxwood, and lime/linden); terracotta and other ceramics, and cast metals such as pewter and zinc (spelter).

Sculptures are often painted, but commonly lose their paint to time, or restorers. Many different painting techniques have been used in making sculpture, including tempera, [oil painting], gilding, house paint, aerosol, enamel and sandblasting.

Many sculptors seek new ways and materials to make art. Jim Gary used stained glass and automobile parts, tools, machine parts, and hardware. One of Pablo Picasso's most famous sculptures included bicycle parts. Alexander Calder and other modernists made spectacular use of painted steel. Since the 1960s, acrylics and other plastics have been used as well. Andy Goldsworthy makes his unusually ephemeral sculptures from almost entirely natural materials in natural settings. Some sculpture, such as ice sculpture, sand sculpture, and gas sculpture, is deliberately short-lived.

Sculptors often build small preliminary works called maquettes of ephemeral materials such as plaster of Paris, wax, clay, or plasticine, as Alfred Gilbert did for 'Eros' at Piccadilly Circus, London. In Retroarchaeology, these materials are generally the end product.

Sculptors sometimes use found objects.
From: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.246165758748934.68154.216884508343726&type=1

Have you ironed your room yet?--by Adrian Searle

Adrian Searle visits Do-Ho Suh's fabulous fabric flats 

Tuesday 23 April 2002
The Guardian 

Do-Ho Suh's flat comprises a corridor, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Some doors open on to emptiness and to spaces as yet undefined. The apartment is weightless and translucent, like the house of an invisible man - or a reader of Marx who woke one morning to discover that all that is solid had already begun to melt into air.

Perhaps this insubstantiality reflects the mind of a man who is as yet uncertain where he is, a life not so much in exile as in transit, between countries, cultures, languages. Sometimes the entire apartment is hidden in a gunny sack or neatly folded away in a suitcase, and packed off to another part of the world - Seoul, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Seattle. You are here. You are not here.

Here, for now, is London's Serpentine Gallery, where Korean-born Suh's first British show opens today. His Manhattan apartment, or rather a diaphanous, ghostly version formally known as 348 West 22nd St, Apt A, New York, NY 10011 USA, is the best work here.

Light flows through the walls and doors as well as the windows. You can walk the corridor and stand in the rooms. More than that, you can check out the heavy lock and the spyhole in the front door, the building's sprinkler system slung from the ceiling, the window frames, the panelling and fireplace and the old-fashioned radiators. The switches, sockets and shelves are here, the bath and the sink with its exposed plumbing, the shower head poking out from the bathroom tiles. The loo, the kitchen stove, the fridge and the concertina doors of the built-in wardrobe: it is all in place, but somehow all a little bit wonky and insubstantial, everything meticulously sewn from sheer curtains of nylon fabric.

The plumbing is sewn as though it were pockets and sleeves, the toilet like a bodice, its handle like the finger of a glove. The walls and doors are like the panels of a skirt - the apartment is a dress. Where Claes Oldenberg's soft sculptures of objects were clunky and rumbustious, Suh's apartment is delicate, impassive, entirely lacking in irony, except that to have expert Korean seamstresses replicate a rackety New York flat is already somehow absurd. Were it not so oddly poetic, it would be ridiculous.

A second dwelling, and an even more complex displacement, hangs like a levitating Wendy house in the Serpentine's central gallery. This is a fabric replica of a building that was itself a copy of an ordinary Korean house. The first replica dwelling was erected in the gardens of the emperor's palace in 1828, so that the emperor might experience for himself the living conditions of ordinary Koreans - much like Marie Antoinette's playtime milking parlour at Versailles. The edifice was demolished in the 1970s and Suh's father, an eminent painter, bought the lumber in order to construct a duplicate. Suh's fabric version is a further copy. Where the New York flat follows the contours of a typical 20th-century urban gaff, the Seoul Home is a refabrication of hand-sawn timber beams and joists, expert vernacular joinery. It floats, out of place and out of time, untouchable and somehow dematerialised.

So far, so good. These are undoubtedly the 40-year-old artist's most arresting works. They seem to belong alongside other examples of artworks that take real spaces as their starting point - Oldenberg's vinyl bedroom, Gregor Schneider's terrifying Dead House, Ed Keinholz's bars and brothels and fetid rooms, Rachel Whiteread's casts, Ilya Kabakov's Soviet interiors. Yet Suh's works do not belong, either in one place or another. The translucency and ephemerality of his chosen material speak of tradition or rootedness in a culture - think of rice and mulberry-paper sliding walls and screens, the fluidity and permeability of inside and outside in much eastern architecture. But they also imply a kind of displacement, or things recollected rather than present.

These are very rich works in all sorts of ways. Looking at the New York space, one is aware of the hand made aspect, of the care and delicacy of Suh's copy, in contradiction to the beat-up serviceability of the real Midtown eyrie. New York, it seems to me, is irrevocably masculine. Suh's model - a kind of antidote - asserts the feminine.

The rest of the show is much less rich. Several works have conformity as a subtext: a "welcome" mat, the word picked out in a few black figures among the rows and rows of otherwise identical, Jelly Baby-like amber figures; a raised glass floor you can walk on, the plate glass held up on the raised hands of yet more thousands of figures, each no more than a couple of inches high. Are they supporting you and your great big feet, or are you bearing down on them? This is an obvious ambiguity, even though it is quite nice to lie on the floor and look through the sides of the glass to get a proper view of the Lilliputian crowd. You feel like Gulliver, and you get your clothes dirty. All this stuff seems to do with the subsuming of the individual into the mass. If a western artist were to make works that portrayed Koreans - or Chinese or Japanese people for that matter - as militaristic communitarians, they would be lynched.

The huge, empty, spread-armed costume Some/One, which appears to be made of chain mail or metallic fish scales but turns out to be manufactured from thousands of fake dog tags, seems to labour a point about collectivity and militarism, just like the marshalled ranks of 60 identical jackets and collars that make up High School Uni-Form. You never need to look at these more than once. I much prefer a group of little drawings, more genial cartoons than anything, about the idea of home. One has a little house with a gently puffing chimney, walking on purposeful human legs away from Seoul towards LA. My Country has a big empty outline of a house with lots and lots of feet peeking out from under it, all walking in the same direction. We might read the drawings as a parable of the artist's progress from his homeland to America, a journey between cultures. The drawings wrap up Suh's preoccupations.

Serpentine Gallery exhibitions are invariably elegant, however variable the art. Elegance is nice, but elegance in art is everywhere these days. I'm sure that if the Serpentine decided chaos was the thing, it would arrange that elegantly too. There's as much stylistic conformity and mannerism in contemporary art - globally - as in any other aspect of modern life.

Differences and distinctions are much more interesting and vital. There's a paradox here, as an old New Yorker cartoon once had it: angry spouse shouts at artist hunched over expressionist canvas, "Why do you have to be nonconformist like everybody else?" The important thing for an artist, I believe, is to find a voice, as much as a subject, a material, or a style. The voice, if you like, is a place as much as it is a tone or a style. It is a place to come from, even if it is never really home. It is what you're stuck with, even if you don't belong. The conflicts in Do-Ho Suh's art, between rootedness and displacement, are as good a place to begin as anywhere. It's all in the apartment.

My Country, 2003

From: http://www.artspace.com/my-country.html
Mixed Media
My Country is a representation of one of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s seminal “wallpaper” pieces. From afar, the image looks to be an informal outline of a house held up by tiny feet, all moving in the same direction. Up close, the pixilated dots turn out to be tiny oval portraits scanned from the artist's high-school yearbooks. The work taps into ever-present themes in the artist’s work, including that of identity, individuality and conformity, and cultural and personal displacement.

Doorknob/Bathroom, 2003

From: http://www.artspace.com/doorknob-bathroom.html
Doorknob/Bathroom is a full-scale reproduction of a doorknob in the artist's Chelsea apartment. Do Ho Suh often works with semi-transparent fabrics that he delicately sews together to represent—and defy—existing and functional spaces and objects. Doorknob/Bathroom exists as an isolated architectural element, separated from Suh's apartment, and therefore abandons its ties with a specific place and becomes a loose abstraction with a new-found flexibility and transparency.