Permanent Collection
Do Ho SUH
Do Ho Suh’s enormous work is displayed in the Center’s largest exhibition space, with its soaring nine-meter ceiling. This beautiful transparent red, orange, and colorless gradation is composed of tens of thousands of piggy-backing resin figurines suspended from the ceiling in a radial array. Sparkling like a chandelier under the lighting, the work evokes a sense of the splendor of life, while at the same time expressing the metempsychosic idea that life and death are merely two sides of the same coin, endlessly cycling back and forth in an eternal and unbroken line. With the work filling the all-glass wall facing the street, this gallery symbolizes Towada Art Center’s commitment to making art open to the city.
Active internationally, Suh is known for his dynamic style, often repeating incomprehensible volumes of similar elements−in works that include vast numbers of small figures holding up a glass floor, or a stainless steel statue pulling countless red threads−and using diaphanous fabric to reconstruct to scale buildings and architectural interiors in which he has lived.
Photo: Oyamada Kuniya
Courtesy the Artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong
Do Ho SUH
Born 1962 in Seoul, South Korea; currently lives and works in London,UK. Earned his BFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design, and MFA in sculpture at Yale University School of Art (US). Suh expresses feelings of cultural displacement through sculptures and immersive installations of domestic architecture and household items, his series of translucent fabric sculptures recreating to scale the textures and delicate details of spaces in which he has lived. Suh represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale (Italy, 2001). Recent solo exhibitions include “Passage/s” at Towada Art Center (Japan, 2018), “One: Do Ho Suh” at the Brooklyn Museum (New York, US, 2018) and “Robin Hood Gardens” at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, 2019).
2008
Acrylic, stainless steel wire
508×713×809 cm