Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia is a major survey spanning three decades, from the 1990s to the present. One of the artist’s most comprehensive projects to date, it is his first solo exhibition in the southern hemisphere and presents emblematic artworks across a wide range of media including installations, sculptures, drawings, printmaking, and video works.  

Suh is known for his large-scale sculptures and architectural installations, which address the often-complex relationships between the body, memory and space; and  meditate on notions of belonging, identity and home. 

Encompassing portraiture and architectural references, Suh’s works have a distinctive biographical dimension in their evocation of the artist’s childhood and schooling in South Korea; the family home in which he grew up; and his relocation to cities including New York, Berlin and London and the various spaces he has lived in as an adult. Diasporic experience and the space between different cultures and histories is a recurrent refrain within the works, which situate the home at the centre of our shared physical and psychological experience. 

Curated by guest curator Rachel Kent, Chief Executive Officer, Bundanon Trust NSW, with Megan Robson, Associate Curator, MCA Australia, the exhibition brings together significant loans from public and private collections, alongside a major new installation Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022). In this ambitious project, the artist has meticulously recreated at a 1:1 scale his childhood home in Seoul, a traditional Korean hanok house with its characteristic tiled, curved roof, through a series of graphite and mulberry paper rubbings, which remained on the exterior of the original building for almost a year. 

Artist Do Ho Suh said: “It is hugely exciting for me to be exhibiting this body of work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Much of my work is taken up with the idea of how we clothe our movements through the world – through time (linear and non-linear) and place. I’m interested in survival techniques, the spaces we carry within, as well as those we occupy externally. I hope the exhibition will strike a chord at a time when we have all been forced to consider the boundaries and strictures of different spaces anew.” 

Publication
A new commissioned publication features essays by curators Rachel Kent and Megan Robson, and architectural historian AnnMarie Brennan, along with illustrations of Do Ho Suh’s acclaimed artworks and installations. The catalogue is available to purchase from the MCA store and online. 

Also, on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists is the MCA Australia’s annual exhibition of contemporary artists, aged 35 years and under. In its 31st edition, Primavera is an important platform for a new generation of Australian artists. MCA Collection: Perspectives on place brings together artworks that explore the social and physical aspects of place, and Yirrkala Prints: Artist Room, MCA Collection presents collagraphs by six senior First Nation Yolŋu artists: Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Mr. W. Wanambi, Ms. M Wirrpanda and Ms. N Yunupiŋu.