One of my favorite Korean artists Do-Ho Suh has just opened a new exhibition at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. The New York based artist has made a name for himself on the international art scene with his large scale fabric installations, where he recreated houses he's live in to explore the issue of cultural displacement. He's also done several though-provoking installations using thousands of small little figurine to explore the relationship between individuality and collectivism. “All of my works really come from the same idea. They all deal with space; being an architectural one or a figurative one like your personal space,” he told me .At the STPI , Suh has revisited some of his previous themes but also explores some new ones. Several of his new works portray isolated figures with shadowlike forms hovering over them. They are “based on the belief that one is not exactly one” but “many different things — other people’s influence, history, different personalities. But you don’t see it, it’s invisible.” He continues to use threads in many of his paper pulp works, but my favorite is actually “Karma Juggler”, a monumental etching spanning up to three metre with a stunning visual confluence of hundreds of individually hand drawn, concentric circles composed to resemble a metaphorical figure supporting the greater whole, juggling all his karmas. The mirrored symmetry underlines Suh’s prevailing theme of Karma - the force generated by one’s actions that is reflective of its next existence.
Suh’s ephemeral thread drawings represent an important breakthrough in the repertoire of the artist and the innovation of working with paper pulp at STPI. Starting with stitched sketches, these sewn on drawings were carefully extracted from fabric and set into freshly made handmade paper. The artist’s deft strokes are transfigured in the fluidity of threads and the intricate matrix of knotted, entangled strands. These sensitive yet strong thread lines reveal isolated figures with shadowlike figures or structures hovering over them.