Do Ho Suh’s public plinth to be installed at Smithsonian
A striking sight will greet visitors stepping into the pedestrian plaza at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington from April 27 onward — a mammoth empty plinth, curiously held aloft by a swarm of tiny anonymous human figures.
The new sculpture, titled “Public Figures,” by renowned globetrotting Korean installation artist Do Ho Suh, refuses to commemorate a particular heroic individual or a state-level historical event by purposely leaving its pedestal vacant.
Instead, it turns its focus to the nameless crowds underneath, silently bearing the weight of the monument.
“Public Figures,” which will be placed on the Freer Plaza for five years to celebrate the museum’s centennial, is the first installation to be displayed in front of its building in over three decades. Its presence will be visible to more than 25 million annual visitors to the iconic National Mall, home to the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex.
“Suh’s monument will prompt visitors to ask questions — about individual and collective identity, whom we memorialize and why,” said Chase F. Robinson, director of the National Museum of Asian Art. “It also reflects our deepening engagement with the art and culture of Korea, which we have championed since we first opened our doors in 1923.”
Suh is an artist best recognized for his series of otherworldly, large-scale fabric replicas of his former homes and studios in Korea, Rhode Island, New York, London and Berlin.
The 62-year-old’s spectral sculptures and architectural installations of varying sizes — from single household items like door handles and light switches to life-size residences he has inhabited — often grapple with questions surrounding memory, displacement and the body’s relationship to physical space.
He became one of the earliest contemporary creatives to be featured at the Smithsonian museum in 2004, when his “Staircase-IV,” a hovering fabric stairway leading to nowhere in particular, was included in the exhibition series, “Perspectives.”
The National Museum of Asian Art, boasting a collection of over 46,000 objects from East and Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Islamic world, currently cares for nearly 800 Korean artifacts.
In 2025, the institution will be one of the destinations for a Euro-American touring show featuring a treasure trove of relics that the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee bequeathed to Korea’s national museums.