SHINUK SUH

The Artist

Conscious Isolation

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Shinuk Suh (1988, South Korea) practice examines the ideologies that his family, the media, the politics, the religious organizations, the educational system, the law and the communication and culture in South Korea infused into him. This feeling of deprivation between the ideologies imposed on him and his own persona led the artists to seek refuse from reality in his own creations.

Taking himself as the core subject in his works, Shinuk Suh developed his own unique language to express the ironies and repressed emotions brought by the ideologies imposed on him and his contemporaries. To bridge this link, between his personal live and the ironies he analyses, the artist’s language draws inspiration from his childhood cartoons and animated movies’ humor and exaggerated behaviors that are then repurposed into his personal context.

In reality, the cruel and tragic scenes in animation, which in life we wouldn’t find amusing, become a comic factor that induces laughter. Comedy in animation has a limited laugh allowed within it. However, if these same dark situations are seen in reality, they turn into a defining tragedy. Through this practice, Shinuk Suh continues to explore the potential of cartoons and humor as an artistic language, researching its power in helping to deal with his own and others’ misfortunes and painful realities suggesting a deliberate avoidance of the untruthfulness and absurdity of the real world, and yet at the same time, is very much focused on expressing how difficult it can be to distinguish between comedy and tragedy in such a world. When and why does comedy become a tragedy in real life and vice-versa?

As continuous comprehensive research of ongoing social phenomena, Shinuk Suh continuously finds new ways of showing his work. In his most recent projects, he has moved from the more 3-dimensional sculptures in metal and rubber to the 2-Dimensions of the digital screen as a form of interrogating the current consumption of technology in every day’s live. Not only questioning how technology imposes control over one’s body but also how it’s re-shaping the actual meaning of ‘real(ness)’.

Shinuk Suh completed his BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins University and his Masters in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Arts. He has been shortlisted for the Artist’s Collecting Society Bursary Prize (2018), the Solo Award for the Chiara Williams Contemporary Art (2018) and for the Contemporary Visions (2019). He was the recipient of the Unit 1 Gallery Solo Residency in 2019 and has since done participated in over 10 group and solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Russia and Germany.