Booking slots for Do Ho Suh's exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul, released on a weekly basis, sell out every time. Long lines still form outside the museum because visitors hope to get in on the spot, including through canceled reservations. Once inside, they linger, talk at length and take photograph after photograph to carry the works home with them. The pattern is not confined to Korea. Suh's solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., from March to August 2018 drew more than 1.1 million visitors. The Art Newspaper, a leading international art publication, ranked it the most-visited contemporary art exhibition in the world that year.
Why the enthusiasm? The bright, delicate colors and the meticulous detail — down to reproductions of keyholes — are surely part of the appeal. But the real draw of Suh's work lies in how it installs all of us, nameless as we are, as the works and the protagonists of the museum. "Who Am We?" (2000), on view in Gallery 5 at MMCA Seoul, at first looks like wallpaper with nothing on it. Only when viewers move close enough for their noses to touch the wall do faces come into view. The artist reduced portrait photographs from yearbooks to the smallest size at which they remain identifiable and rendered them as wallpaper. The floor is a work as well. Bending down reveals tens of thousands of tiny human figures holding up the glass floor. This signature piece — showing that countless unseen individuals sustain society, and that identity takes shape within the relationship between the collective and the individual — carries a love and respect for people.
The same is true of houses. "Nest/s," a 22-meter-long work occupying a museum corridor, joins together the hallways and doors of the homes where Suh lived in Seoul, New York, Berlin and London. There are kitschy gate ornaments imitating the "four gracious plants" of traditional painting, an outdoor air-conditioning unit stamped with a logo, showerheads and faucets that look much like one another. These are someone else's homes, and yet they call to mind your own. Door handles and locks, light switches and electrical outlets, all made of translucent fabric, look familiar, like something seen somewhere before.
"What I hear most often is, 'I'm looking at Do Ho Suh's house — why am I thinking of my own?' These are houses I lived in, but the concept of 'home' is universal, so I think overseas visitors respond to it just as Korean visitors do. Empathy seems to form when viewers recall the journey of their own lives inside the work. So it isn't my home — it's our home."
The exhibition runs for 164 days through Feb. 9 of next year. To keep viewing conditions comfortable, the museum caps daily attendance at 6,000. The record for MMCA Seoul is held by the Choe U-Ram exhibition, which drew 650,000 visitors, followed by last year's Ron Mueck show with 530,000 and the Damien Hirst exhibition in the first half of this year with more than 540,000. If the current pace holds, cumulative attendance at Suh's exhibition is projected to approach 800,000, which would set a record for a single exhibition at the MMCA. Museum shop merchandise incorporating the artist's work, including T-shirts, has been selling out one item after another.
