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Lot Essay
Appearing for the first time in an Evening sale, Suh Do-Ho is one of the best recognized and most sought after Korean artists in the international art world. Long recognized for his innovative use of materials, unique approach to issues of cultural identity, human relationships, and destiny. Pursued by public and private collectors alike, Suh's works have been exhibited extensively in such institutions as The Samsung Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, and Whitney Museum of American at Phillip Morris in New York. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of America Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among numerous others. Suh represented Korea in the 49th Venice Biennale and is also the recipient of numerous notable art awards.
Featured here, Cause & Effect (Lot 2042), has serves as a pivotal moment in Suh Do-Ho's oeuvre. It serves as the culmination of over a decade of work in related themes, while also suggesting new directions that the artist would take in more recent years. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, Suh's primary focus was on questioning the boundaries of cultural identity and exploring the relation between individuality and collectivity. These themes were keenly explored and adeptly embodied through such works of High School Uniform (1997), Who am We?(2000), Public Figures (2001), Some/One (2003), and the Paratrooper Series (2005). Throughout these works, we can see that autobiographical traces, remnants of Suh's personal memories and experiences, and his complex relationship with his native South Korea has long formed the central tenet of his art. These works are the result of this conflict between the cultural and emotional attachment to his homeland, and the need to forge his own identity in the world.
Transporting biographical elements into his works, Suh reflects on the dialectical nature of identity, creating an oscillation between theme of individuality and collectivity, strength and weakness, East and West, inside and outside, suggesting that identity's ambiguity is not merely derived from the modern concept of collectivism, but instead has always been shaped and will continually be reshaped as a form of evolution by the communication and relationship of the individual and those around them. As such, Suh's works have an urgency and vitality that rooted in his personal experiences, but approach themes that are universal in nature, and his works appeal to viewers regardless of their nationality or background, allowing them to engage with Suh's works both viscerally and psychologically.
With Cause & Effect, Suh extends this dialectical pursuit in a work of considerable philosophical depth. It extends Suh's earlier thoughtful investigations, his interest in both large-scale sculptural installations and more intimate works on paper throughout his earlier career, while significantly suggesting a fearless step toward a new stage of artistic development and his interest in rendering human destiny and origin in powerful visual metaphors. In this work, Suh's focus shifts away from identity defined through spatial exploration to questioning that very identity and its origin. As a result, he achieves true universality beyond autobiographical narrative.
Cause & Effect is a visually mesmerizing ceiling installation of in the shape of a chandelier, a magnificent composition densely hung by strands composed of thousands of tiny resin figures stacked atop one another. Both the subject and title of the work relate to the Hindu concept of karma, which refers to actions and their implications in this, previous, and future lives. It was as early as 2003 that Suh employed the concept visually with the appropriately titled work, Karma (2003), depicting a larger-than-life set of legs in business attire and dress shoes, striding cruelly over an infinite group of figures, desperately trying to preserve themselves. In this work, Suh is still investigating the tension between the individual and the collective within a hierarchic social structure, trying to decipher the boundaries between them, and how the two conditions coexist. Suh has stated, "Often, people, even critics, think that my work is about individuality disappearing into anonymity. But it's not. I don't think anonymity exists actually. It's just a convenient way to describe a certain situation. It's our problem not to see certain individuals, or not to see difference or individuality. I just want to recognize them."(M. Sollins, Art: 21 Art in the Twenty-First Century, vol. 2. New York, 2003) The Karma concept appears again in 2004 in a beautiful colour pencil drawing, Karma Juggler, illustrating that Suh's further meditation on this theme. With Cause & Effect, Suh eliminates the domineering figure and presents instead a collective of integrated and mutually dependent. They stand upon each other's shoulders, suggesting strength in numbers, but significantly they are not emerging from the earth to reach new heights. Instead they dangle precariously from the sky, like a tornado that has gathered energy to touch down on the earth, and in Suh's handling only one figure finally lands securely on his feet. As such, as Suh has pointed out, his work is not at all about anonymity or the dissolution of identity. Instead, he seems to suggest how precarious if not arbitrary our individual destines are, literally and metaphorically placed within an intricate web of interdependence that extends through time and space. The individual may be the one who has successfully landed on his feet, but he equally carries the burden of all the actions and consequences of the previous generations. Suh takes the notion of interconnectedness and successfully invites us to experience it in a constructed space; unwittingly, we are assimilated with the lone figure at the tip of the vortex that embodies all those who went before.
Featured here, Cause & Effect (Lot 2042), has serves as a pivotal moment in Suh Do-Ho's oeuvre. It serves as the culmination of over a decade of work in related themes, while also suggesting new directions that the artist would take in more recent years. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, Suh's primary focus was on questioning the boundaries of cultural identity and exploring the relation between individuality and collectivity. These themes were keenly explored and adeptly embodied through such works of High School Uniform (1997), Who am We?(2000), Public Figures (2001), Some/One (2003), and the Paratrooper Series (2005). Throughout these works, we can see that autobiographical traces, remnants of Suh's personal memories and experiences, and his complex relationship with his native South Korea has long formed the central tenet of his art. These works are the result of this conflict between the cultural and emotional attachment to his homeland, and the need to forge his own identity in the world.
Transporting biographical elements into his works, Suh reflects on the dialectical nature of identity, creating an oscillation between theme of individuality and collectivity, strength and weakness, East and West, inside and outside, suggesting that identity's ambiguity is not merely derived from the modern concept of collectivism, but instead has always been shaped and will continually be reshaped as a form of evolution by the communication and relationship of the individual and those around them. As such, Suh's works have an urgency and vitality that rooted in his personal experiences, but approach themes that are universal in nature, and his works appeal to viewers regardless of their nationality or background, allowing them to engage with Suh's works both viscerally and psychologically.
With Cause & Effect, Suh extends this dialectical pursuit in a work of considerable philosophical depth. It extends Suh's earlier thoughtful investigations, his interest in both large-scale sculptural installations and more intimate works on paper throughout his earlier career, while significantly suggesting a fearless step toward a new stage of artistic development and his interest in rendering human destiny and origin in powerful visual metaphors. In this work, Suh's focus shifts away from identity defined through spatial exploration to questioning that very identity and its origin. As a result, he achieves true universality beyond autobiographical narrative.
Cause & Effect is a visually mesmerizing ceiling installation of in the shape of a chandelier, a magnificent composition densely hung by strands composed of thousands of tiny resin figures stacked atop one another. Both the subject and title of the work relate to the Hindu concept of karma, which refers to actions and their implications in this, previous, and future lives. It was as early as 2003 that Suh employed the concept visually with the appropriately titled work, Karma (2003), depicting a larger-than-life set of legs in business attire and dress shoes, striding cruelly over an infinite group of figures, desperately trying to preserve themselves. In this work, Suh is still investigating the tension between the individual and the collective within a hierarchic social structure, trying to decipher the boundaries between them, and how the two conditions coexist. Suh has stated, "Often, people, even critics, think that my work is about individuality disappearing into anonymity. But it's not. I don't think anonymity exists actually. It's just a convenient way to describe a certain situation. It's our problem not to see certain individuals, or not to see difference or individuality. I just want to recognize them."(M. Sollins, Art: 21 Art in the Twenty-First Century, vol. 2. New York, 2003) The Karma concept appears again in 2004 in a beautiful colour pencil drawing, Karma Juggler, illustrating that Suh's further meditation on this theme. With Cause & Effect, Suh eliminates the domineering figure and presents instead a collective of integrated and mutually dependent. They stand upon each other's shoulders, suggesting strength in numbers, but significantly they are not emerging from the earth to reach new heights. Instead they dangle precariously from the sky, like a tornado that has gathered energy to touch down on the earth, and in Suh's handling only one figure finally lands securely on his feet. As such, as Suh has pointed out, his work is not at all about anonymity or the dissolution of identity. Instead, he seems to suggest how precarious if not arbitrary our individual destines are, literally and metaphorically placed within an intricate web of interdependence that extends through time and space. The individual may be the one who has successfully landed on his feet, but he equally carries the burden of all the actions and consequences of the previous generations. Suh takes the notion of interconnectedness and successfully invites us to experience it in a constructed space; unwittingly, we are assimilated with the lone figure at the tip of the vortex that embodies all those who went before.