Net-Work (Perth) - Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh takes to the beach in Perth

Hidden gems from the Korean artist, William Kentridge and Jeremy Deller intrigue at Perth Art Festival

We're always keen to catch up on what artist Do Ho Suh is up to so we were happy to see that he has re-imagined his 2010 work Net-Work on the banks of Perth's Swan River as part of the Perth Art Festival. The Korean artist's work appears alongside work by Jeremy Deller and William Kentridge. 

Do Ho Suh's always delicate and often powerful work encourages contemplation of the identity of the individual in a globally linked society. Best known for his intricate sculptures that defy notions of scale and site-specificity, his work draws attention to the ways viewers occupy and inhabit public space.

Viewed against a backdrop of tall, city office buildings, the play on the negative and positive ideas of being caught in a net or conversely working a network are not lost on the viewer. The tightly woven mesh, created from thousands of gold and silver figurines joined at the hands and feet, glints pleasingly in the Perth sunshine. 

 

Net-Work (Perth) - Do Ho Suh
Net-Work (Perth) - Do Ho Suh

 

"The space I’m interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one," he has said, crediting his base in New York as having had a great influence on his work and his perception of the world. "My work started from that slippage or discrepancy, the crack. The difference between my mother tongue and foreign tongue," he says.

The Perth Festival, curated by Margaret Moore, also includes Jeremy Deller's bouncy version of Stonehenge , Sacrilege (first seen in London in 2012) while perhaps the most unusual contribution comes from William Kentridge who has his complex multimedia installation The Refusal of Time on show - the first time it has been exhibited in the country.  The piece, originally created in 2012 for dOCUMENTA (13), grew out of Kentridge's reading of the book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps (2003) and was made in collaboration with composer Philip Miller and film maker Catherine Meyburgh. 

 

Net-Work (Perth) - Do Ho Suh
Net-Work (Perth) - Do Ho Suh

Kentridge is the star of a Phaidon monograph, which includes contributions from J.M. Coetzee and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Meanwhile, you can read about the significance of artists like Do Ho Suh in Defining Contemporary Art, a revolutionary history of the most pivotal moments from the last 25 years of art, featuring contributions from the likes of Bob Nickas, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Okwui Enzwezor.