An Outlook on Do Ho Suh

   Following the Art 21 video, Do Ho Suh was definitely the artist I was most interested in following up on. I was alreayd fairly familiar with Kiki Smith's work and while I enjoyed learning about Kara Walker and Trenton Doyle Hancock, my interest will always lay closer to my preferred medium. And in steps Do Ho Suh, an artist devoted to sculpture who's work I'd seen maybe once before, not to say I knew who's work I was looking at. He works in a style I love, that I follow and am inspired by, yet I hadn't heard of him and I figured out why. Ai Weiwei. The two come from very close geographic regions, have a similar process, work in repetition, often commenting on unity, conformity, and the power people in numbers have to challenge the status quo set by the government. More so, from a subjective standpoint, I think Do Ho Suh and Ai Weiwei are at that same top tier as artists, both in concept and quality of finished product.
   So what;s the separating factor in terms of their global recognition? Maybe it's the consumer (and by consumer I don't actually mean the general public, I mean that collection of a few thousand people across the world who dictate who's going to make it big and who won't), but they're weren't the original cause. Initially, it was censorship. Chinese government censorship didn't necessarily create Ai Weiwei, not alone anyway, but they brought him to prominence, which for the humanist in me is phenomenal. Knowing that almost the entire art world and community can rally around shedding light on the injustice and censorship of an entire nation through one man's work. Yet, the artist in me is mixed, conflicted in my interpretation. Does Ai Weiwei deserve the recognition and accolades he is receiving? Absolutely. Should the culture he was born into be so influential that like-minded artist are overlooked, almost entirely because their work isn't seen as forbidden in their homeland? I don't know. It's a question I don't think anyone like myself who falls into the WEIRD category can answer. But it doesn't sit quite right for me, that's a certainty. For now, that general, ambiguous, open-ended conclusion is the closest I can come to answering a question I'm not sure exists, which is "What about the other guy?".

-Ciarán