Do Ho Suh, Cause & Effect, 2012

“Cause & Effect evokes a vicious tornado. This vast ceiling installation is a composition of densely hung strands that anchor thousands of figures clad in colors resembling a Doppler reading stacked atop one another. My focus shifts away from identity defined through spatial exploration to questioning that very identity and its origin. Cause & Effect is a physical realization of existence, suggesting strength in the presence of numerous individuals. The work is an attempt to decipher the boundaries between a single identity and a larger group, and how the two conditions coexist. Cause & Effect metaphorically places the individual within an intricate web of destiny and fate branching from a belief that every being is spawned from the lives he or she may have lived previously. The vertical context of the figures becomes a collection of past influences, and again, begins to define the inherent powers and energies that characterize an individual."

This is not a paradigm of violent collision or melting pot assimilation. It’s more about interdependency, an hope for human understanding, where things coexist. Do Ho Suh directs physical attention to the mutual forms of human encounter, the human emerging in the wake of forces, and the human becoming.