Banner artwork: Eun-Kyung Suh, '87 (installation view), silk organza, threads, 244” w x 24” h x 2” d (installation); 3”w x 3”h x 2”d (each box), 2008. Eun-Kyung Suh's work is featured in a number of exhibitions this summer, including her upcoming solo show, The Voided, which opens July 16 in the MAEP Galleries of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Cropped and reproduced for access+ENGAGE with permission of the artist
About her work, Suh writes: "I have been creating a series of sculptural vessels as a metaphor for human emotion, memory, and experience. For this series, I consider a vessel to be any type of container used to hold something. These sculptural vessels are created out of diaphanous textiles, using a design originally inspired by Bojagi, a traditional art form in Korea. Bojagi is the wrapping cloth used to cover, store or carry everything from precious ritual objects to everyday clothes and common household belongings. It is usually a square cloth of various sizes made out of silk, cotton, and ramie. Bojagi was originally made by anonymous women throughout the Choson dynasty 
(1392~1910) in Korea. Leading isolated lives in a society in which the ideology of Confucianism was dominant, they had no art education. Despite this, they developed Bojagi with artistic beauty and unique styles. They applied various techniques such as embroidery, painting, dyeing, gold leaf, and quilting to employ its motifs, patterns, and colors. They made good use of small, otherwise useless, pieces of leftover cloth, patching them up into useful wrappers.
"My interest in Bojagi does not lie on how to re-create traditional Bojagi, but in how to extend the basic patchwork structures into my sculptural vessel forms. I am fascinated not with Bojagi’s overall design but with the process of making it, one patch after another. The woven fabric is made of repetitive horizontal and vertical structures; the process of Bojagi-making is composed of a series of vertical and horizontal actions that move against and beyond the fabric itself. It involves collecting cloth scraps, re-configuring and re-constructing them for a different use, which I interpret, is the way our memories form between layers of time and space. The daily moments we experience are modified, fantasized, deleted, reconnected, and stored as a collection of memories. In this context, I convert flat cloth patterns into sculptural vessel forms to metaphorically contain memories, which are stored where a layer of time and space intersect. Folding, wrapping, and sewing are employed to transform two-dimensional fabrics into three-dimensional enclosed forms or vessel, which function as a private and sacred place where people record their memories. Enclosed textile vessel forms with printed images and texts demonstrate narrative work in both pictorial and sculptural fields."
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About the artist: Eun-Kyung Suh works as an assistant professor in the Department of Art + Design at the University of Minnesota - Duluth. Since receiving her MA and MFA in Design from the University of Iowa, she has built an extensive record of national and international exhibitions, including many shows in galleries around the state of Minnesota.
Related exhibitions:
Eun-Kyung Suh's work is currently on view in Antipodal Encounters: Eun-Kyung Suh and Cecilia Ramon at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hopkins, MN, through August 1.
Her artwork will also be included in the group exhibition, opening July 9 at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Print - Now in 3-D!
She will have a solo show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) galleries. The Voided opens July 16 and will be on view through September 26.
Credits: All images courtesy of the artist. (Middle right) 100 Floating Fears, textile sculpture; (bottom left) Purple on Thursday (detail), textile sculpture made of double-layered, transparent chiffon fortune cookies containing historically significant texts.