Do Ho Suh’s Moody Center Exhibition Reveals the Art Behind His Art

Houstonia’s The Must List tells you about something going on in Houston that you absolutely cannot miss.

Surely, imagination looks like Do Ho Suh, In Process. The multimedia exhibition anchoring the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University this fall swims in color, with bold, saturated hues as well as transparent, aspirational tints. Shapes—supple, lopsided blobs, wispy tendrils, and angular, sturdy forms—suggest life, structures, and possibility. Sketches and rubbings hint at ideas, instilling a feeling of intimacy.

In Process, on show until December 21, is an unprecedented journey into the mind and makings of internationally renowned artist Suh. When viewed together, the exhibition’s artworks reveal not a finished collection, but rather the processes undertaken—the way concepts are pursued through research, collaboration, and work, both physical and mental. It’s also an immersive experiment that’s perfect for the Moody’s mission to examine the art behind the art, as it were, and finding novel connections between disparate disciplines.

“It’ll be interesting not just to share the view into the artist’s practice, but to invite visitors to participate and contribute to one of the works themselves,” says Alison Weaver, founding executive director of the Moody. “That’s how we’re a little bit different than a museum proper. We are going to show you Do Ho Suh’s process and invite you to contribute your own creative voice to the conversation. Then, we hope that you’ll take that back into your field of expertise.”

Overlapping traditionally segmented interests is a recurring theme for Suh, too. Preparations for one part of the exhibit, The Bridge Project, began in 1999, envisioned as a multimedia, interdisciplinary commentary on themes of displacement and diaspora, identity, and finding a place to call home. The project is personal. After growing up in Seoul, South Korea, Suh moved to New York City. He originally dreamed up a bridge as a way to physically connect the places that had become part of him. By 2010, Suh was collaborating with an expert team of designers, architects, and engineers to draft up plans for a bridge that would connect all of his homes together—Seoul, New York, and London—an infrastructural fantasy spanning not just continents, but oceans.

Suh worked closely with engineering students at Rice University last year, attracted to the school’s (and, of course, Moody’s) shared values of bringing fields together instead of siloing them from one another. Three different bridge designs came from this collaboration, which also featured some major design challenges along the way. In addition to requiring real-world materials and dimensions, Suh stipulated that the bridge could not harm the environment, but also must withstand our world’s increasingly extreme climate. Accommodations for human beings traversing the bridge—food, water, shelter—were needed, too. The final designs are included in the In Process exhibition.

Also part of In Process is Artland, a crowd-sourced installation of mini sculptures created on-site by guests. Participants may craft their own clay inhabitants to populate the titular archipelago, designed by Suh. Such an interactive component asks visitors to reflect on the aspects of their own processes: How do they plan and execute a project? How does an idea make the leap from brain to final product? The tangible aspect of In Process makes its themes all the more real, allowing viewers to juxtapose their own thoughts with Suh’s and see what they have in common—or not.

Self-discovery is part of the process, after all.