North Wall

Do Ho Suh, son of Korean artist Suh Se-Ok, was born in 1962, soon after a major military coup in South Korea. After moving to the

United States to pursue his artistic career and further studies, he became fascinated with the issues of cultural, physical and

architectural displacement. ‘It could be said that home started to exist for me once I no longer had it’, he has said. Suh’s light and

transportable silk homes became synonymous with a new generation of Southeast Asian artists working globally at the turn of the millennium, in which motifs of movement, flux and transition reflected their diasporic communities in a moment of change, and their ongoing reconciliation with a newly globalised reception for their work.

The North Wall, 2005 a key work in his evolving sculptural project an ongoing collection of homes, captured here is the exterior of his parents’ home in Korea, modelled on the Scholar’s House in the

Palace Complex. In Jade green it mimics the traditional ceiling colour – meant to depict the universe and endless possibilities – a feature of the scholar’s house. The sculpture is both light and indicative of

the temporary conditions for belonging and a permanent and transportable reminder of place. As such it is a powerful symbol for human belonging in conditions of diasporic change.

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