Atrium Project: Do Ho Suh

About the Exhibition

The Kovler Atrium, the MCA’s bright, two-story entrance, is regularly home to large-scale works by today’s most relevant artists. For this iteration of the Atrium Project series, internationally renowned artist Do Ho Suh takes over the entire second-floor lobby wall with a work that is as complex and moving as his larger practice, which often centers meditative explorations of belonging, identity, and home. In Who Am We? (Multicoloured) (2000), the artist consolidates thousands of 1/8 inch portraits from his high school yearbook into a single space, arranged in uniform rows. When viewed from a distance, the composition is almost indistinguishable, appearing as a speckled mass of dots. As viewers approach the work, discrete identities begin to emerge from the blur, simultaneously affirming and destabilizing the relationship between the individual and the collective.

The exhibition is organized by René Morales, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, with Luke Immins, Curatorial Intern.

About the Artist

Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, Seoul, South Korea; lives in London, United Kingdom) has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Tate Modern, London. In 2017, Suh was awarded the Ho-Am Prize, considered South Korea’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize. He holds a BFA in Oriental Painting from Seoul National University and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University School of Art, among other degrees.