Do-Ho Suh recently opened his fourth solo show at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. Do-Ho Suh was featured in Season Two of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century.
On display is the exhibition entitled Cause & Effect, which consists of a collection of large-scale installations and more intimate works on paper.
The fractured nature of narratives, memories and storytelling permeate Suh’s œuvre and invite the viewer to consider his physical and psychological self within the context of the work. In a thoughtful investigation of identity, Suh continues to activate subtle dialogues around space, human relationships, and displacement. Developing the structure of spatial identity, the artist now attempts with Cause & Effect to render destiny metaphorically.
Cause & Effect evokes a fierce tornado: hence a vast ceiling installation, depicted above; a composition of densely hung strands that anchor thousands of figures clad in dynamic gradations of intensely warm colors stacked atop one another, exemplify how Suh’s focus shifts away from identity defined through spatial exploration to questioning that very identity and its origin. Cause & Effect is a physical realization of existence, suggesting strength in the presence of individuals, as it begins to swirl out into adjacent galleries. The work is an attempt to decipher the boundaries between a single identity and a larger group, and how the two conditions coexist.
The vertical context of the figures becomes a collection of past influences, which begin to define the inherent powers and energies that characterize an individual. Thus Cause & Effect metaphorically places the individual within an intricate web of destiny and fate branching from a belief that every being is spawned from the lives he or she may have lived previously.
Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West 26 Street. New York, NY 10001
The exhibition is on view through December 22.