Do Ho Suh @ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA)

Pixels of Humanity—A Review of Atrium Project: Do Ho Suh

February 24, 2024 – February 2, 2025

Do Ho Suh’s enormous installation at the MCA rises two stories and covers half the atrium’s east wall—but I couldn’t find it when I entered the space. I had to ask an attendant to point me to the work and discovered I was standing right in front of it.

First exhibited in 2000, “Who Am We?” is a deceptively simple project made up of every student portrait published in the artist’s high-school yearbook over several decades. Suh arranged thousands of the one-eighth-inch portraits in an offset grid and printed them on wallpaper. It’s a challenge to discern individual features from even a few inches away. Back up several feet, and the wallpaper dissolves into a bland beige-gray that resembles acoustic fabric.

Like other works in this transnational artist’s evocative canon, “Who Am We?”—a literal translation of a grammatically correct Korean phrase—is a meditation on belonging, displacement, memory and home. The decision to install the work in the atrium, through which visitors transit on their way to other areas of the museum, aligns with Suh’s interest in movement and interstitial spaces or passageways (architectural, geographic, personal). In fact, the MCA’s atrium, with its visitor’s desk, queue-line ropes, seating areas and soaring glass façade, feels more like an airport than a museum.

Wallpaper, a product typically associated with the home environment, is a portable material that can be rolled up and installed in a variety of spaces. Many of Suh’s other works, such as his suspended, sheer fabric re-creations of rooms and buildings, are equally portable and reference the way migrants must whittle their possessions down to only the things they can carry.

Several writers have seen “Who Am We?” as a commentary on the individual’s struggle against political systems and social mores that are conformist, especially in Korea, where Suh was born and raised. In the quarter century since the project’s inception, more potent systems have emerged at meta-scale, as globalization has fused with technology to accelerate the compression of time, space and place, thus flattening the world.

The handmaid of this flattening process has been the screen (phone, tablet, desktop computer), which has given us the opportunity to interface with nearly anyone anywhere at any time. Yet just as the screen’s vivid representation of 3D space is an illusion, so is the idea that social media fortifies human connection. Surveys show that, despite being hyperconnected, we feel more isolated and unhappy than ever before.

Looking at Suh’s relentlessly flat installation from this perspective, the portraits read less like innocuous Benday Dots and more like pixels on a massive screen projecting uniformity, monotony and opacity. More ominously, the portraits engender associations with mug shots, ID photos and security databases, reminding us of how technology is increasingly exploited for surveillance purposes.

Suh’s project acknowledges the innate tension between our individual selves and our desire to be part of a group. History shows it is all too easy for the group or system to prevail. To see the features of the students in Suh’s installation, we have to train our attention and focus on each portrait. Similarly, resisting the homogenizing and totalizing effects of technology requires vigilance and intentional (re)engagement with others. We can take the first step by putting down our phones.

(Published in Newcity, April 24, 2024)