Making Tools for Female Artists: Haiyoung Suh
Haiyoung Suh’s solo exhibition, 《Making Tools for Female Artists》 shows how tools and environments needed by women can be created through collaboration with women in different situations. The exhibition uses sculpture, video, photography, and documents, and is divided into three series.
The first “Making Tools I Need,” uses everyday objects to create sculpture tools suited to the artist. After years of traditional sculpture training, Suh wanted to move beyond standardised methods and work environments and started making tools and space that fit her needs.
The second, “Tools for Tapestry Collaboration,” shows eight women working together to create tapestries that reflect women’s characteristics. This process highlights women’s differences and diversity.
The third, “Tools for Collaboration Between You and Me,”, develops this idea further, making tools to support the dreams of individual women. Through these projects, Suh explores the uniform conditions women often face and creates opportunities for women to connect, support each other, and collaborate.
Tapestry: A textile art made by weaving images by hand
Artist’s Note
I work primarily in sculpture, exploring both the limits and possibilities of traditional media. To avoid repeating conventional, result-focused approaches and fixed meanings in traditional sculpture, I focus on process-driven work that reflects my personal conditions and life experiences.
In this context, the series, 《Making Tools for Female Artists》 focuses on the condition of being a woman. It addresses the discomfort I felt as a female sculptor with standardised methods and work environments and explores practical alternatives.
For a long time, I trained in traditional, modernist sculpture and believed I had to adapt to its methods to be recognised. But after leaving school and creating my own environment for sculpting, I realised that the traditional workspace was largely designed around male bodies and ways of thinking. The mental, physical and environmental limitations I experienced made it difficult for women to sustain a practice in sculpture.
Beyond sculpture, I have seen many female artists around me give up their work due to external circumstances rather than lack of will or skill. I believe the main cause is social and professional environments that limit women’s ability to work. To address this, I wanted to create alternatives within my field of sculpture, starting with tools and spaces that support women’s work.
The three-part series begins with “Making Tools I Need.” In this work, I create tools I need as a female sculptor, using everyday objects or bamboo rulers to make items like a sculpting spatula (hera). In the process, the original function of these objects shifts to a new purpose for sculpture, and materials and tools that usually serve only as means to an end become the final sculptural work, turning traditional sculptural conventions upside down.
The process of making tools suited to my hands leads to the question: what would a tool reflecting “femininity” look like? The second work, “Tools for Tapestry Collaboration,” explores this by creating alternative work environments suited to women. I collaborate with seven women to make a single tapestry, using this process to design collaborative tools. Through the collaboration, I discovered that building relationships is essential, and I developed tools to help understand each other’s differences.
The third work, “Tools for Collaboration Between You and Me,” creates tools and environments that actively reflect the experiences and thoughts of women today, from the perspective of a female sculptor. Building on what I learned from the tapestry collaboration; that womanhood cannot be defined as a single thing and that differences and diversity among women are what define “women”, this work experiments with collaboration to express that idea. Through “Tools for Your Dreams,” each woman’s unspoken dreams and desires are revealed through the proxy of a “tool,” inviting reflection of the standardized, uniform expectations often placed on women.
In this way, the series, 《Making Tools for Female Artists》 begins with creating tools suited to myself and extends to creating environments that reflect diverse women’s lives through collaboration. I do not claim that these collaborations produced definitive solutions for women, nor can I judge them as success or failure. What matters is the encounters with women who willingly shared their time and experiences, and the opportunity to see the many possibilities inherent in being a woman.