art and identity

Some/One 2001

stainless steel military dog tags, nickel-plated copper sheets, steel structure, glass fiber reinforced resin, rubber sheets.

Figure: 81 x 126 inches

Installation View at Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale.

Do-ho Suh is a Korean born contemporary sculpture and installation artist. He was born in 1962 and moved from Korea to the United States in 1991. This relocation had a defining impact on his work, with identity and the notion of 'home' being at the core of most of his work. I first studied him in High School and still find the way he presents such deep complex human emotions with such sensitivity and clarity, fascinating.

In Some/One (above) Suh places thousands of dog tags all over the gallery floor that eventually rise and form a robed figure. The intensity of the work grows as the viewer moves through the installation. The sound of walking over the thousands of dog tags is an important element of the artwork. In this work Suh is exploring identity in relation to the collective in both mandatory military service in Korea and in life. The uniformity and conformity of Suh's experience in the military impacted his own sense of identity.

Each dog tag embodies one individual identity, each being a precious, unique entity but each is lost in repetition as the single becomes the many and the many function to become one unity. In this particular work Suh is exploring the point at which the individual's role in the group is at the cost of their unique identity.

Do-ho Suh on art21: http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=70