Do Ho Suh | Tracing Time at Modern One
It’s been a while since I visited an art exhibition for fun.
I approached Modern One, the National Gallery of Scotland’s free Modern art exhibition space, with the sole intention of escaping an oncoming drizzle—and, perhaps, of buying an umbrella in the giftshop.
In the ground-floor galleries of Modern One, rooms shot off from a single, somewhat narrow hallway, and the ongoing show stretched, snakelike, through its spaces; visitors worked their way around one elongated circuit. Entering with no prior knowledge of what I was about to see, I left thrilled by what I’d witnessed. Tracing Time, Modern One’s current show of featuring internationally-acclaimed, South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s robust oeuvre, was luminous, transportive, and nostalgic without invoking melancholia.
My visit to the show on my first day at Modern One was unforgivably quick. Still aiming to beat the afternoon rain, and feeling rather hungry yet unwilling to linger in the busy museum café downstairs, I zipped through the exhibition at a speed that made me feel like an art-viewing imposter. Nonetheless, this initial pass brought me towards some standouts from the exhibition.
Suh’s thread paintings lined the opening passageway of the exhibit, and immediately brought my aimless museum wandering into focus. Home, I’ve found out, is a major theme throughout his corpus. In the Modern One show, this theme was particularly manifest in the display of an ongoing (since 2010/11)1 series of works of multicoloured thread on paper. The threads embedded in Suh’s weighty paper productions amalgamate with each other into a sprawling, architectonic build-up of colours and textures, seemingly sketchily drawn, yet clearly finely attuned to geometric forms and specific floor plans. The precision of many of Suh’s thread paintings hints at a site-specificity amidst transience that renders them ripe with reminiscence, but their amorphous layering and non-specific swirling strands allow a suggestive mapping-onto of my own remembered experiences. The combination of threaded words (names of places: Seoul, LA, London) with the scribbly forms of fibre housing running on human legs around their papered worlds posed both a visual joke—someone’s running home?—and a sense of a circular hunt, of both pursuing a sense of home and of being pursued by it.
Later, back in my flat, I smell fresh laundry in the air. The clothing and the home, intrinsically tied together, share a fabric of intimacy simultaneously as site-specific as a foundation and as transportable as a cloth garment or the memory of one heavy aroma.
Still in the dark about Suh’s oeuvre, the thread paintings set a precedent for medium that I believed the rest of the exhibition would follow. I was wrong!
A duo of large works filled with concentric circles next drew my attention—variations in the size and concentration of circles seemed, from afar, to make the surface of each page undulate. The two works were both part of Suh’s “Karma Juggler” series, one an etching in red depicting (2007) two reclining figures lying foot-to-foot with each other, and the other a lithograph showing a single blue figure (2010) holding aloft a heap of the same blue circles that constituted its body.2
Karma Juggler (2007), the red etching, was especially eye-catching. Its wall text suggested that the image looks like “a pair of lungs,” evocative of an “unbroken cycle” of time marked by breath, unceasing, in and out. I liked this reading, the sense of reciprocity between two people that it implied, but the composition of the image reminded me more of the structure of time and focus in a Shabbat morning service.
We view the two figures in Karma Juggler (2007) from above, birds-eye view or cross-section. Their arms sweep upwards to encompass a slew of bubbles, and their legs, disproportionately small, taper to the points of their connected feet. The symmetry of the composition creates a sort of sideways hourglass shape. I think of what I’ve been told in the past about the Saturday morning service—how the opening prayers lead towards a central, concentrated section that eventually opens out through a d’var on the weekly Torah reading to the more social moment of kiddush—and can’t help but feel that the ambiguity of the forms Suh depicts opens itself to more interpretation than he could have anticipated. I don’t think this is a flaw in the work’s ability to communicate, and in my imagination Suh doesn’t mind the stretch; I take the opportunity to read into his paintings something that I already know, and I appreciate it.
Despite their openness to personal interpretation and connection, I felt that Suh’s pieces were conscious of their status as fine art objects. In a way, how could they not be, museumified and already famous? Wall texts for the exhibition incorporated quotes from the artist himself, suggesting a self-consciousness that was also an (art) historical consciousness. As always, I was curious to know how this shaped the way in which Suh produced his work.
In a room on the opposite side of the narrow hallway, on a second visit to the exhibition, I found another piece from the “Karma Juggler” series, this time from 2014. It was done in red thread of varied shades, embedded into handmade cotton paper. The image had a violent beauty, its strings tempestuous in contrast to the concentric circles Suh carefully produced in 2007-10. Negative space in this piece bespoke chaos rather than control—the head of the 2014 figure, though discernible in the earlier etching, dissolved in an explosion of entangled lines and blank areas of absence (?) years later. The thread looked like entrails entwined across the page, a flurry of consequences more than the meditation on interconnectedness and space that Suh expressed in the 2010 piece. I wondered at the choice to separate these works across two different rooms—the decision seemed to have been made on the basis of medium, but could equally have been about conceptual tone.
I may have been most impressed by Suh’s installation art. The colours of his work sang throughout the exhibition, and equally so in a large sculptural element in bright purple and green. A long corridor of thread and sheer fabric configured as a passageway of translucent doors completely, the installation complemented the visuals and concepts on display in other formats throughout the rest of the show—this happily at odds, I felt, with sculptural or object-oriented art I’d seen in other shows that seemed to mimic artistic projects in other media without adding anything new.
Overall, I loved my introduction to Suh’s art through the varied show at Modern One. The embedding of thread into woven paper showed a technical skill and intent that belied the seemingly improvised aesthetic of chaotic, sketchlike, yet gracefully-placed, string. Drawings and sketchbook pages, also prominently on display throughout this exhibition, showed a meticulous respect for architecture that felt satisfying.
My final thought upon trailing away, again into the drizzle outside, was about the ‘ghost in machine’ invoked in a wall text towards the end of the exhibition. Suh’s drawings at some points become so complex, memories imbricated with personal history and architectural forms figured with dense lines, that he calls on assistants and even robotic means to execute his visions. I considered the presence of the artist within the homes he depicts and carries with him, and in the physical traces of material on paper, canvas, cloth, and space—a consciousness pervading the tangible works, embedded within their techniques even when his own hand does not directly touch the page, and present too in their content and concept without overpowering the universality of their meaning.3
source: https://elephant.art/ho-suh-threads-liberty/
One difference between the 2007 and 2010 Karma Juggler pieces was the variety of hue within their given colours—I felt I noticed more shades of blue in the later piece, but couldn’t tell whether there was in fact more nuance or whether I could just recognise it better in that colour palette.
One point at which I thought the self/broader meaning line got a bit hazy was in a room full of casts of empty uniforms, of the kind Suh wore to school or during his military service. These casts intrigued me in relation to the notion of relatability and the depiction of an individualised self in art, because they referred most specifically to the shape and corporeality of Suh’s body—a more concrete object, and therefore more difficult to universalise. In much of Suh’s art, even in works where his titles are self-referential or in which he draws on his own memories, the figures he depicts are not consistently rendered as forms of himself, nor do they look similar to each other, according to any internal pictorial logic. Ghostly uniforms (which were quite beautiful, in their way) notwithstanding, I think the ‘self-portraits’ and presence of the artist within this exhibition were not obtrusive—the only other possible instance of this line being crossed was when I read a title of a painting that seemed too self-consciously ‘arty,’ which in itself is a rather subjective critique.