Since his relocation to the United States in his late twenties, Do Ho Suh has undertaken a continuing exploration of the boundaries between self and other, individual and group, past and present, and private sector and public sphere. In his works, which draw on personal memories and experiences, these polar elements struggle and interact in their reconfiguration as a single unit.
Who Am We?: Uni-Face is a single-channel animation video made up of countless portrait photographs. This ongoing project began in 1996 when Suh was a graduate student and began collecting portrait photos of Korean people who were close to him. In this video, the multinational and multiracial faces of people in cities such as Seoul, Singapore, London, Venice, and Tokyo are gathered together. In front of the screen, viewers are able to project and add their own faces onto the myriad portrait photos that eventually combine to create a single composite face. The Uni-face project will continue online, allowing participants from all over the world to add their faces. Since his early career, Suh has been particularly interested in individual/group identity and the semantic dilemma of “I” and “we.” The title, which deliberately uses incorrect grammar, reflects the artist’s conflicted state of mind: “I cannot exist as I am alone, I am a part of the whole, and I cannot be split from the whole.”
The collective figure expressed in Suh’s work enables viewers to look at the duality of social identification such as individuality/anonymity, diversity/uniformity, and homogeneity/heterogeneity. Beyond the aperture generated between the dual sides, his fundamental question comes to us: ”Who am I?”
