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? In Korea the after-effects are everywhere, as Suh notes: “I think also that probably most Korean men also have this interest…I don’t know if it’s the right word…but some kind of fetishism about this stuff.” Some of the Korean films I’ve watched recently expose this undercurrent, a sensibility where the military is the lens through which society is viewed (Joint Security Area), the carrier of the national memory (R-Point) or the subterrain of Korean society, waiting to break through to the surface (The Host).

Is the Korean military system a reflection of that “whole Korean society,” that “militaristic, very hierarchical structure,” or is it vice versa? A modern military is continually tensed between needing to have the rigid structures and processes that are essential for planning and training, and the flexible reactions and creative thinking that are essential for combat operations. In the same way, Do-Ho Suh’s installation has the same feeling – a very formal, static piece that shimmers with a thousand possible interpretations.

What does SAM say? Some/One

represents artist Do-Ho Suh’s interest in individual and collective identity… as the title of the work indicates, juxtaposes the collective-represented by a larger-than-life armor sculpture-and the individual, consisting of life-size shiny-metal dog tags, each unique and representing a single soldier.

Yet the reverse is also true; the armour can only be worn by one individual, who relies on the protection of the collective represented by the dogtags. Who writes these museum pieces?

Literalist interpretations of the installation make me want to punch somebody out of sheer tedium. Suh reports that “Somebody told me it reminded them of Christ or that statue in Rio de Janeiro”, presumably because all sculptures that form a human figure with outstretched arms must be related, right? Surprisingly that person didn’t mention the Piss Christ, probably because they were a bourgeois art dabbler with no taste. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but if you can’t respond to a piece of art with a bit more imagination than that, then why bother going to a museum in the first place?

Do-Ho Suh’s installation is an advertisement for a new brand of Korean alcoholic beverage, designed to catch your eye as you’re driving home late one night through Seoul or Los Angeles. It’s the winning entry in a competition to find the most innovative fashion design that combines high camp with excellent protection, for Hollywood starlets with intense concerns for their personal safety. It’s a scene from a film where the ancient armour is stolen by evil forces and the souls of the dead are channeled through to create an unbeatable enemy for our (as yet nameless) hero. Or possibly a discarded plot idea for Samurai Jack.

Some/One feels like a dream sequence for one simple reason: it emerged fully formed from a dream that Suh had.

It was night and I was outside of this kind of football stadium and I was approaching this stadium from the distance and I saw this light in the stadium. And so I thought there’s some kind of activities going on. And as I approached the stadium in order to enter the stadium, I started to hear these clicking sounds, like the sound when the metal pieces touch together. It was like there were thousands of crickets in the stadium. And then I entered the stadium in the way that the football players enter the stadium. I walked slowly and went into the stadium on the ground level. And then I see this reflecting surface in the dream and I realized I was stepping on these metal pieces that were the military dog tags.

Back to that overly-officious guard telling off the kid who recreated those night-time imaginings and wandered onto Suh’s field of dreams. The irony that he completely missed is that he and the child represented the two aspects of the military that I mentioned earlier – the rigid rules versus the creative thinking. We need that tension not just in the military, but in our daily lives, and we need Do-Ho Suh to remind us.

You can read the complete Art21 interview with Do-Ho Suh, listen to a short mp3 interview, or watch a RealPlayer presentation of Some/One. The internet just blows my mind.