Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time

17 Feb-1 Sep 2024

Overview

South Korean-born, London-based Do Ho Suh (born 1962, Seoul) is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. This expansive exhibition will explore the foundational role that drawing and paper play in Suh’s artistic practice, focusing on his collaborative methods, experimental techniques, and innovative use of materials.

Suh creates engaging and imaginative artworks that ask questions about home and identity. ‘Home’ is so much more than the place you live. Your own version of home is a fundamental part of who you are, influenced by your day-to-day life and your deepest memories. Do Ho Suh explores some of these fascinating ideas in his first solo exhibition in Scotland, taking over an entire level of Modern One. It will present the artist’s complex and compelling thread drawings – in which cotton thread is embedded in handmade paper – alongside architectural rubbings, paper sculptures, cyanotypes, printmaking and watercolours.

There will also be an immersive installation of Suh’s famed ‘hubs’, life-size sculptures that recreate physical spaces in colourful, translucent fabric. Visitors to the exhibition can enter and move through this innovative reimagining of places meaningful to the artist and his life.

A focus of the exhibition will be the artist’s works with paper, which are fundamental to his collaborative ways of working, and which he uses to capture the textures and sensations at play when we interact with the spaces around us. Shown publicly for the first time will be a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks: personal, unconstrained spaces for speculative thinking, in which Suh explores his past, present and future. In this inspiring and timely exhibition, drawing is the connective thread that binds together Do Ho Suh’s creative energies.