Interview: Korean artist Do Ho Suh on the meaning of home and his fish obsession
My work has always evolved around my personal experience with the spaces that I lived in, says the artist known for his sculptures modelled on the places he has lived.
That kind of separation anxiety happens all the time, but it happens less and less. Maybe I feel that for a second, but I know that somebody is going to appreciate the work — especially if it goes into a museum. Also, with few exceptions, the objects [replicated in my works] are not something unique. It's something mass-produced and you can easily find in any cheap New York apartment, for example.
[ ] That's true, but for many people you live in a place where a lot of people have lived, unless you built your own house. Those objects and spaces are very personal because I lived there, but there were many people who lived there before. So there's a personal attachment, but also the general public could associate with the objects one way or the other.
My work has always evolved around my personal experience with the spaces that I lived in. Lately, places or buildings with historical significance — or interesting to me — have been coming into my work, and that's new to me. But generally, it takes a while for me to do that.
I get that question quite a lot. Because travelling is much easier than 20 or 30 years ago, my lifestyle allows me to travel to many different places, including my home in South Korea.
Yeah, but I'm spending most of my time in London. Now that I have a home there, it's quite different. The definition or meaning of home has been changed, so I don't know where my work is going to go from this point. It's to do with my constant travelling and moving; I feel probably less rooted in one place.
I would say, relatively, yes. As I get older, it's getting more and more difficult to deal with jetlag. The thing is, I cannot really recover from previous trips before I have to go somewhere else, so there's always this sort of accumulation of fatigue from travelling. But even on the plane I sleep relatively well, thank goodness.
I used to be, because I wanted to study fish. If I hadn't become an artist, I'd probably become a marine biologist. I was quite interested in the similarities and differences of certain species, because they just look the same but have different names. Maybe it was a kind of training or exercise for me to see the very subtle differences that nobody else would pay attention to.
Yes, I think that was probably part of it when I was little. But the attention to detail in my art-making is in a way also related to my obsession with fish, I guess. Remotely there's a connection, but I'm not sure whether I can take the fish as a subject matter for my work — yet.
[] Right, and it's transparent and you can actually see through things. That's very interesting — I'd never thought about it. [] Yeah, you should write that. You never know how the inner mind works.
