When I was touring the Seattle Art Museum earlier this year, a small child wandered onto the outskirts of the installation “Some/One” by Do-Ho Suh. Almost immediately a security guard stepped up to the hem of the installation and instructed the child to get off. The guard probably didn’t realise that he was going against the artist’s wishes, and definitely didn’t realise he was acting out the tension embodied in the piece.
In an interview with Art21, Do-Ho Suh explained that
Every time I install “Some/One” you always face the back of the piece first… And that means you don’t see the interior of the piece when you enter the room. You have to go through the steps and walk on the piece and then walk around the piece and then finally you face the front of the piece and then you are able to see the inside of the piece. And that moment is very important, I think. Not only experiencing the piece physically by stepping on the dog tags, but also when you see the reflection of yourself inside of the piece. Then you truly become a part of the piece.
While much of Suh’s work is really about questioning identities, it relies heavily on military reference points. As he says in the interview, since a two-year military service is mandatory in South Korea, “that’s a great deal of the Korean man’s identity,” and this militarism saturates “the whole Korean society, the whole system is actually based on this militaristic, very hierarchical structure.”
In countries which maintain national service – Switzerland is a good example – the military is more easily accepted than in countries where serving in the army is the exception rather than the rule. When everybody goes through the same institution, that institution comes to seem intensely normal, no longer worth discussing – and so it goes from being accepted to being politely ignored:
For me, again, this experience in the military was not something special because everyone had to go through and has to go through that process in Korea. So if you talk to someone who went to military, they all have similar stories. That made me a little bit more comfortable to use this military experience. Maybe it’s something special here in the States, but if I show “Some/One” in Korea then I think it will get a different response because it was part of their everyday life.
I wonder what that response would be? Continue reading →