Navigating Homesickness through Sculpture (Do Ho Suh) | Art21

DHS: Once my fortuneteller 
told me that I have five horses

and that means that I travel a lot.

So I’m basically destined to leave 
home and live somewhere else.

I think I wanted to leave 
home because of my father.

He’s a successful painter.

Somehow I felt that his fame

overshadowed me and I wanted to do my own thing.

You know, New York is crazy, really really noisy.

And I couldn’t sleep that well.

And I was thinking when it was my 
last time to have a really good sleep

and that was back in Korea.

So, I thought, like, how am 
I going to bring that space.

And physically it is impossible,

so I came up with this idea 
of transportable fabric.

I want to carry my house, my home,

with me all the time, like a snail.

My house project, Seoul Home/LA Home,

is a replica of the interior of my parent’s house.

I grew up in the house.

It’s a very traditional Korean house.

My father built the exact replica 
of this famous traditional building.

I just didn’t want to sit down and cry for home.

I just wanted to more actively 
deal with the issues of longing.

My mom helped me to find national treasures,

basically people who keep traditional techniques,

craftsmanship, things like that.

Those ladies taught me how to sew certain seams.

There’s an expression in 
Korea “You walk the house.”

People actually disassemble the house

and then rebuild in a different location.

So I had to make something that 
you could put in a suitcase

and bring it with me all the time.

I was able to discover so many things

when I was measuring and that was really personal

and a kind of emotional experience.

You often finds like little 
marks you did when you were a kid

and that brings all the 
memories of your childhood.

And when you go through that process,

the space becomes really a part of you.

I really like this idea of my art 
becomes a part of the architecture.

It started from my interest 
in the notion of space,

particularly this notion of personal space,

or individual space.

Seoul is very crowded city,

and on the street people bump into each other.

And you know, somebody could just,

you know, hit your shoulder.

And that’s normal.

But I realize that’s different here.

So my perception of this personal 
space has, I think, changed.

It was just for me very natural to 
think about the interpersonal space,

the working at table space between people.

And so that’s how this idea of individual

and the collective came in.

I intentionally chose that pose.

If you look at the figures’ facial expressions,

they don’t look oppressed.

So it has kind of like a positive gesture,

but what they’re doing is 
actually just bearing weight.

And I don’t really make any statement on that,

its just really up to the viewer.

I was asked to do some public 
sculpture in this public place

and I started to think about 
what it means, public space,

and what’s the meaning of public art or monument.

I tried to re-think this whole notion of monument.

…make sure it is polished very well.

I want it to be very shiny…

Usually, its bigger than life size 
individual, illustrious figures.

But what I did was I took it down,

and make it smaller and make it into multiples.

I just want to recognize anonymous,

everyday life, people who pass that space.

For me it was more important actually

coming from Korea to the United States,

and that kind of displacement, 
the cultural displacement,

allowed me to compare two different cultures.

So I was able to actually look back

and think about these issues of the individual

and the collective.

I scanned the portraits of sixty students

from my high school year book into the computer.

And I put my face first

and the rest superimposed on top of each other

so it creates this average of one class.

In a way it’s self-portrait.

I collected yearbooks from 1970 to 1993

or something like that

and I see same face from different year books,

so maybe we are not that unique.

I was curious what we share and what we don’t,

and how this sort of individuals converge.

The whole Korean society is actually 
based upon this kind of militaristic,

very hierarchical structure.

When you finish your elementary school 
you enter middle school in Korea.

That’s probably the age of 13.

Then you shave your hair.

And then you have uniform

And it came as some kind of 
trauma for most of the kids.

And also you are called by numbers,

you know number 37 or something like that.

My number was 46.

–Ok, ready?…

Koreans, they all have this kind of nostalgia,

this kind of personal attachments to the uniform.

I mean it’s the funny thing about the uniform

because we hated to wear that uniform.

It’s very strict and if you don’t 
follow that uniform, you’re punished.

But we tried our best to differentiate 
our uniform from one another.

From the moment you are born,

you know you are going to be in the military

because everybody has to go.

So that’s a great deal of 
the Korean men’s identity.

I was in the army for almost two years.

It was quite important part of my life

and I think it just comes out in my work.

I found this army surplus store

and the owner happened to be this old Korean guy.

And he have a lot of free dog tags

and allowed me to use this special 
typewriter to type dog tags,

you know letters and numbers.

Every man talks about his own 
experience in the military,

you know when you have a drink.

And they’re unbelievable stories.

I was really good at many things.

I was a sharp shooter and I had 
a black belt before the military

and I could run really fast and 
that was you know very helpful.

But the program was basically push

your psychological and physical to extreme,

so actually you can kill someone.

I really sort of experienced 
what it means to be dehumanized.

So for me like everything was 
something to think about.

In my work I can let other 
people see things differently.

I think this desperate sense 
of displacement gives me space

to have some kind of critical 
distance to everything.