World leading contemporary artist Do Ho Suh to hold first Scottish exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2024

Immerse yourself in the imagination of one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, Do Ho Suh (born 1962, Seoul), at the National Galleries of Scotland in early 2024. Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time will be the largest European exhibition to date of the artist’s work on paper, with artworks spanning 25 years of Suh’s career.

This major solo exhibition by the South Korean-born, London-based artist will be free to visit, taking over the entire ground floor of Modern One in Edinburgh from 17 February 2024 – 1 September 2024. With over 100 works on display, many never seen before, the artist poses questions such as ‘Where and when does home exist?’ and ‘What defines our sense of place?’.

Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time explores the integral role that drawing and paper play in Suh’s work, focusing on his collaborative methods, experimental techniques, and innovative use of materials. Drawing is the foundation of the artist’s multidisciplinary practice. It acts as a springboard that propels ideas formed on a blank page into creations of astonishing variety and ambition. The exhibition will travel forwards and backwards in time, organised according to the artist’s transformative approaches to drawing as a toolkit with endless possibilities.

Visitors will discover Suh’s compelling and technically innovative thread drawings, in which multicolored threads are embedded in handmade paper to create sewn images of some of the artist’s most iconic motifs. Thread takes on a new form as a mode of drawing, mirroring the use of fabric in the artist’s sculptures. The thread drawings are created at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore, where Do Ho has been working collaboratively with the Creative Workshop team for over a decade; experimenting together to produce his works on paper. Works on display from this series include the dazzling, multicolored Staircase/s (2019); a seemingly impossible vertical stack of colour, winding and repeating the communal staircase from Suh’s New York apartment building, the embroidery process creating a cloud of loose threads in its wake.

These monumental thread drawings will be exhibited alongside animations, architectural rubbings, paper sculptures, printmaking and watercolours, including works such as A Perfect Home (1999); a simple, even childlike, drawing of a tiny home and garden, perched in an impossible location. This watercolour was the starting point for the artist’s longest running research project, The Bridge Project, which explores the concept of his ‘perfect’ home. The project considers what form this home might take and questions whether such a thing exists. For Suh, it’s located in the centre of a bridge that connects Seoul, New York and London, the three cities he has called home. The Bridge Project demonstrates that a rudimentary sketch has the power to develop into something far greater. A selection of the artist’s sketchbooks will also be shown publicly for the first time, giving visitors an insight into the personal, unconstrained spaces in which Suh explores his past, present and future.

Using both practical problem solving and imaginative sketching, drawing helps the artist to envision new relationships between architecture and the body, and new ways of challenging and re-defining shared public spaces. The exhibition also includes an immersive installation of Suh’s famed ‘hubs’; life-size sculptures that recreate transitional spaces – thresholds, corridors and doorways – from sites meaningful to the artist in colourful fabric. Visitors to the exhibition can enter and move through these innovative installations, giving a real-scale sense of the places which hold significance to the artist. The translucency of the fabric expands on the subjectivity of memory, and the rigidity of Western architecture in comparison to traditional Korean buildings. Suh’s Fabric Architecture can be packed down and transported; a means of carrying home with you.

Paper is also treated as sculptural material. Tracing Time includes a series of Suh’s ‘rubbings’; works made using a physically challenging process of coating the entire interiors of rooms in paper, which is then carefully rubbed in pencil and chalk to create an impression of the original spaces.

Suh’s engaging and imaginative artworks collectively ask questions about home and identity, inviting visitors to consider their own answer. Individual experiences of what home is on a personal level can create a fundamental part of who we are, often influenced by day-to-day life and deepest memories. Drawing is Do Ho Suh’s way of navigating the world, capturing overlooked details, and making sense of how we relate to one another. Tracing Time gathers many threads of the artist’s work and its celebration of human collaboration and creative networks.

Do Ho Suh said: “I am thrilled to be presenting my first exhibition in Scotland at the National Galleries. Paper has been a foundational element of my practice for as long as I’ve been working. It’s more than a medium for me and I’ve sometimes felt that in the West, paper’s strength – literally and symbolically – is underestimated. For me, it has sculptural, architectural and bodily qualities. It works in part because of its mercurial capacities – the ways in which it can absorb, and integrate with, other materials, rather than merely providing a surface for them to sit on. It’s exciting to have this element of my practice engaged with so sensitively and I cannot wait to share this body of work at Modern One.”

Sir John Leighton, Director-General at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “It’s with great excitement that we begin 2024 at the National Galleries of Scotland with the remarkable work of Do Ho Suh, exhibited for the first time in Scotland. Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time will not only bring creative flair, ingenious thought and wondrous curiosity to Modern One, but also a sense of reflection and understanding through his universally binding questions about home and what this truly means for us all. The National Galleries of Scotland are proud to host the work of an artist continually leading the way in his practice and invite the people of Scotland and beyond to join us in this unique opportunity to engage with his exceptional drawings.”

Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time opens at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One on Saturday 17 February 2024.