The Korean artist’s experimentations at STPI over a decade
By A&M

‘Do Ho Suh: Works on Paper at STPI’. Image courtesy of STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore.

‘Do Ho Suh: Works on Paper at STPI’ is a celebration of the Korean artist’s long and fruitful collaboration with the Singapore-based STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery. From his first residency in 2009 at the invitation of Executive Director Emi Eu, Suh has continually worked with the STPI team, and the book is an elegant compendium to honour what Do Ho describes as a “profound sense of friendship” that he feels for his collaborators.

In the opening conversation with writer Martin Coomer, Suh gives insight into how his experiments at STPI have contributed to his practice. Suh is well known for his large-scale fabric installations that explore the concept of the home and the traces it leaves behind in his memory. While the installations are methodically pieced together in his studio, his time at STPI starting with thread drawings has helped him to “appreciate flexibility” and “embrace spontaneity”, given the fluidity and instability of the materials to make the works on paper.

The book offers interesting, varied perspectives of the works on paper created at STPI. In ‘Rubbing/Loving’, which he began in 2015 for his second residency, Suh makes rubbings in colour pencils to create delicate pastel copies of inconspicuous fixtures in his STPI home, such as door handles and electric sockets. In her essay ‘Touching Time: The Rubbings and Recent Works of Do Ho Suh’, Allegra Pesenti likens the making of these rubbings to that of “a blind man familiarising himself with his surroundings”. But we can also read it as a preservation of Suh’s memories living in what he has come to see as his “fourth home”.

From Suh’s second residency also came the cyan blue ‘Cyanotypes’. These are created through a quick photographic printing process using two chemicals ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. Similar to ‘Rubbings’, they are intimate works that capture impressions of things and places, simultaneously specific to a place and yet ubiquitous. Having them fully laid out in this publication effectively shows Suh straddling this duality between the personal and the universal very well.

Beyond his residencies, Suh has returned to STPI regularly for more than a decade, and the date stamps of the works in the book mark his time in this corner of the world. For example, the ‘Myselves’ series grew from 2013 to 2014, then 2015 and 2017. There is a meditative quality to the repetition of the figures within each work, which is emphasised across the works as we see them grow in number and size.

Indeed, through the publication, we see the creative and technical development of Suh’s works at STPI. In the beginning, works like ‘Karma’ (2010), ‘Sitting’ (2010) and ‘Running Man’ (2010) employed threads in a single colour. These are fine examples of a delicate balance between the planned and the unplanned, with tendrils of thread extending from the main figures to give the drawings a whimsical touch of happenstance. In 2014 and 2015, the ‘Running Man’ and ‘Karma’ series exploded in threads of different hues that intertwine, thicken and expand to the edges of the paper to create visually busy imagery. The line quality of the works, in varying thickness, shows Suh and the STPI team’s deft use of the thread as one might wield a pencil in a drawing. The increased precision and accompanying confidence of seasoned hands is charted effectively through the more than 200 detailed illustrations, essays and many behind-the-scenes photographs of Suh and the STPI team at work.

For example, in Sarah Suzuki’s essay ‘Tracing the Thread’, we read about how the collaborative practice between the artist and the STPI team has been productive because challenges quickly turn into new possibilities. She writes that the varied backgrounds of the team help facilitate “crowd-sourced problem solving”. Initially, Suh’s thread drawings required tedious manual labour to remove bits of unwanted paper pulp lodged in the loops of the thread. We learn that it was an intern with a background in fashion and textiles who suggested the use of gelatin-based paper. Usually used in embroidery, it would melt away on contact with water, which eased the making of the works significantly. In this way, the essay reveals the trials and errors that have advanced the making of the works on paper, and deepens our appreciation of them.

The variations on the theme of home can be observed between ‘My Homes’ (2010, 2014), where the figure resides within the house and ‘Self-Portrait’ (2010, 2015, 2017), in which the house is held within the cavity of the figure. These permutations reflect Suh’s rumination on the relationship between the self and the home and how one inhabits the other, and has an impact on the other. It is also explored in the ‘Staircase’ works in 2019. The busy threads that go in all directions call to mind Singapore architect William Siew Wai Lim’s description of “pluralistic, fuzzy, complex and chaotic” urban areas “left behind from the existing or left over from new developments”. These smaller two-dimensional creations are intimate expressions of his lived experience in urban environments that complement his more monumental creations.

Whether one is leafing through the collectable A3-sized publication to admire the works on paper that Suh has co-created with STPI, or pausing at each essay to go more deeply into the collaboration’s motivations and innovations, there is much in ‘Do Ho Suh: Works on Paper’ to satisfy the reader’s curiosity about the workings and outcomes of this productive partnership.

The book is available for purchase at STPI’s The Corner Shop.