HOUSTON — In Do Ho Suh’s Bridge Project, which began in the early 2000s and is still in process today, the artist illustrates a series of increasingly outlandish plots to connect his three homes in Seoul, where he was born and raised; New York; and London, where he currently lives and works. The project encapsulates Suh’s desire for hyperlocal specificity — some bridge plans include his favorite restaurants positioned on a Ferris wheel — at an impossible global scale. At the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Do Ho Suh: In Process revolves around a similar principle: A version of the artist’s studio has been transplanted from London to Houston, complete with shipping containers and studio bulletin boards. This show of mostly unfinished pieces suggests that the artist is an unfixed international entity — a fraught condition that appears, for Suh, both problematic and generative.
A wooden shipping crate sits against a wall in the Moody’s main gallery. Out of its open top, a diaphanous piece of sheer blue chiffon floats at ceiling height. The fabric is an artwork: “Blueprint” (2010) is a 1:1 model of the facade of Suh’s New York City townhome. Pulled out of storage and shipped to Houston, its fabric now hangs across the gallery, where one can begin to make out the stairs and doorways of its earlier shape. The installation emphasizes both the ugly reality of art logistics — looking at it, I can imagine the small army of registrars that enabled its presence in Houston — and its attendant fantasy: a globalized network that allowed a nearly 15-year-old artwork to shimmer, mirage-like, overhead.
Suh’s contemplations of his — and his artwork’s — transcience can sometimes appear out-of-touch: Having three homes in a trio of major cities is, to many, more of a luxury than a burden. A wistful undercurrent accompanies Suh’s work, though, situating his international practice as more fragile than grandiose. In “Gate” (2014–24) and “Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home” (2014), Suh reveals the tedious process that went into the production of the finished “Portal” (2015), a monumental, translucent replica of the traditional Korean-style entryway to Suh’s childhood home in Seoul, which is on view at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In “Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home,” the artist is shown painstakingly rubbing charcoal over a large sheet of tracing paper laid flat across the door’s surface. “Gate” shows the deconstructed results: Steel pins tack disparate components of the entryway along one gallery wall, as easily fragmented as they are united.
Suh’s imaginative, iterative artworks emphasize the loss that accompanies perpetual displacement — even the kind created by art world success. Leaving the exhibition, I wondered how long Suh’s globetrotting would persist: A bloated roster of fairs and international exhibitions feels increasingly unsustainable. Suh, though, seems to anticipate and even enact his own ruin: “Inverted Monument” (2022), the only “finished” work on view at Moody, shows a traditional public statue flipped upside-down, an unidentified, once-lauded figure suspended within its pedestal. Suh transforms this tribute into a tomb, as though waiting for a future icon to fill its place — or his own.
Do Ho Suh: In Process continues at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University (6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas) through December 21. The exhibition was organized by Alison Weaver.
Editor’s Note: The author’s travel and accommodations were provided by the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University.
