서도호와 장소 특정적 미술의 새로운 모델 Ⅰ = Do Ho Suh’s New Model of Site-Specific Art I

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In 1999, Do Ho Suh created a life-size replica of his childhood home using gauzy, translucent green silk. Entitled Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home/L.A. Home, the work has largely been assessed as the artist’s strategic incorporation of Koreanness amid a surging interest in multicultural discourse. Seoul Home, however, was an audacious attempt to rethink the possibilities and limitations of the existing mode of site-specificity. According to Suh, once a site-specific work is removed from its original location, it may no longer offer a phenomenological experience of the place. Yet this severance can open up the possibility for the work to act as a sculptural object that evokes the memory of that place. More significantly, as the piece travels, it gestures toward the lingering discursive specificity of each city, even within the abstract, homogenized space of late capitalism. This article, the first in a two-part study, traces how Suh reconfigured Seoul Home as a mnemonic device through his engagement with the figuration discourse of 1980s Korean art and the commemorative logic of the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt in early 1990s America. In doing so, it proposes a new model of site-specificity—one that foregrounds mobility as a mnemonic and spatially generative force.