Event 2: San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art

I paid a visit to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art last weekend, and luckily Korean sculptor and installation artist Do Ho Suh was having his solo exhibition. Through his works, Suh challenges common conception for space and boundaries. He’s best known for intricate sculptures that defy conventional notions of scale and site-specificity. 

The museum displayed his Specimen Series. Suh replicated appliances and fixtures from his NYC apartment in translucent colored fabric. Installed in illuminated vitrines, these ordinary objects glow from within, appearing luminous, alien, and captured for study. 

I was mesmerized by this installation. How was he able to produce such a big piece of fabric that manages to hold itself together? Yet the attention to detail is incredible; toilets, ventilation pipes, lights, and even doorknobs all resemble real life objects, except made in fabric.  

This exhibition shows Do Ho Suh’s careful planning of the dimension and aesthetics of the piece strengthens my understanding of the connection between art and science. Do Ho Suh obviously has the ability in art to create aesthetically pleasing installations and sculptors, but if he hadn’t carefully chosen his materials and did the math, this big piece of fabric, although enforced by thin wire, wouldn’t have been able to support itself.