Suh Haiyoung is holding her second solo exhibition composed of object and installation works. While she made use of the "bone object" in her exhibition three years ago, in her current exhibition, she makes use of video, ostrich eggs, and resin to express her theme of "rooms". The "rooms"used in Suh's work functions as an epistemological symbol of postmodern media culture and at the same time act as a psychological metaphor of the rooms' residing entities. In the clout of media, all privacy is exposed via the web such that rooms no longer guarantees the personal or the intimate. The information age acts to expand room into forums, but this only maximize people's desires for personal rooms. Suh's "rooms" are an effort to conceptualize such expansion into forums and the ensuing desire for privacy.
<Four Rooms-forum>, being at once private rooms and forums, is made up of four monitors that are surrounded by transparent acryl. The four vertically standing monitors simultaneously relay the happenings in separate parts of the exhibition area in realtime. among the thirty somewhat ostrich eggs that decorate the acrylic walls, four eggs hold hidden cameras (CC-TV) from which the live broadcasts are made. As the audience roams around the exhibition, they will discover their own image successively from one monitor to the next. Here the acrylic room is a room within another room, but images from the exterior exhibition rooms are brought inside the interior acrylic room through the use of internal monitors. Images penetrating from the exterior make up the interior, but at the same time the acrylic walls make the interior room naked to its surroundings. Through such fading of the interior/exterior boundary, the privacy of the personal interior room becomes exposed and the room becomes a forum. Suh also makes use of hidden cameras in the video installation work <Unknown> to make live broadcasts of the exhibition area using three monitors. The three monitors are each placed inside acrylic cases vividly showing the internal circuitry and wires. Through such exposure of the hardware of internal circuitry, Suh substantializes and satirizes media's invasion and sharing of personal territory.
The issue of personal room/forum has been re-emphasized in the structural installation work of <Forum-four rooms>. In this work, she has created four rooms by stacking semi-transparent resin bricks around metal frames. She combined two types of resins, three types of catalysts, and hardener in different ratios to produce bricks with varying shades and transparencies. These bricks made the interior and exterior of the rooms transparent from one another at different levels. Although the four rooms are partitioned from one another, the common aisle unites them into a single structure. Such independent and yet connected duality structure appears to be a metaphor for today's internet culture in which everyone is isolated and yet connected, that is, the personal room is expanded into a forum.
In a gesture of rejection to both the psyche, which expands the personal room into a forum in the name of globalization, and the internet culture, which homogenizes all thoughts and hobbies, Suh introduces the natural ostrich egg as an archetype for private rooms. As noted above, she arranged egg after egg thirty or so ostrich eggs along the acrylic wall face of <Four rooms-forum>. Each ostrich egg, each an independent room, appear to analogize the pre-civilized private room prior to becoming a forum. The eggs at the same time represents the original room where life resides and the prototype for the private room in which the mystery of creation takes place. In contraste to the forum-type transparent acrylic rooms, the ostrich egg private rooms are dark, confined, and closed. However, even the privacy of the ostrich eggs are exposed through small holes at the end of the eggs which were punctured in order to extricate the contents of the eggs and use the outer shells. These holes become windows for the audience to peer inside the eggs. In order to satisfy the voyeuristic desire of the audience, the ostrich egg room has made itself open and into a forum.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the ostrich egg is being used as a metaphor of the artist's nostalgia and desire for personal rooms. This is plainly evident in her series of object works that fetishize ostrich eggs. In her work, <Unbar>, ostrich eggs with small lamps installed on their crowns and silk screen of fragmented body images pictured on their shells are exhibited on a shelf. And in the work, <The Roof Garden>, ostrich eggs with small lamps coated on their shells transforming them into luminous bodies are placed inside a semi-transparent cube made from stainless steel netting. As exemplified by these works, through the ritual of decorating and celebrating the ostrich eggs, Suh expresses her distaste for the civilized room that has become a forum and provides an alternative, an feminine alternative.
In her first solo exhibition three tears ago, Suh presented a sequence of "bone object" works. After making silicon resin castings from bones bought at medical dealerships, she cast-formed various fragmented pieces of human bones including backbone, ribs, collar bone, toe bones, and finger bones. In the same manner of discovering the human form or trace of oneself through the "bone objects", the ostrich eggs objects were used in her current exhibition to express the human instinctive desire for personal rooms and further the feminie homing instinct. Although the subject and theme of theme of this exhibition may differ from her previous exhibition, a logical link can be found between the two exhibitions from the perspective of human investigation. If her first exhibition is in anatomical "body mode", then the current exhibition is in sociological "psychology mode". In this sense, Suh's work is ultimately a human study with the body and the psyche being its two axes. Perhaps her next exhibition will be an expression of a new human study in an integrated "body and psychology mode".