Young Suh: Wildfires
Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. September - December 2018
Bay Area photographer Young Suh spent eight years working on his photo-based series, Wildfires. Far from documentary shots, Suh’s lush and languid images take the viewer from the comfortable position of being just out of the fire’s path, to standing within feet of the source. The dramatic nature of Suh’s photographs lies in a tense and eerie stillness captured on the fringes of Northern California’s most devastating fires, after the flames have subsided or in anticipation of its potential arrival. Suh elegantly communicates the balance between the tranquility of the moment and what is on the horizon.
For some of the images, Suh accompanied firefighters as they set and managed controlled burns to mitigate future disasters. While others in the series were captured on the perimeters of some of California’s most deadly wildfires. Suh explains, “Despite the media saturated rendering of wildfire as a destructive force and firefighters as heroic individuals protecting our civilization, modern firefighting has become a highly complex web of activities involving numerous government and private organizations. My interest, however, is in the position of individuals, often found in the fringe of this colossal system of ‘nature-management’.”
About Young Suh
Born in Seoul, Korea, Young Suh received his BFA in Photography from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn in 1998, and went on to receive his MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he taught large format photography and digital printing. His work deals with the complicated nature of human involvement in managing natural resources and the shifting concepts of nature in contemporary society. Over the last 10 years he has completed two major projects, Instant Traveler and Wildfires. He is currently working on his new project, Let Burn, a photo and video series on controlled fires.
He has had solo exhibitions at Clifford Smith Gallery, Boston, Jane Deering Gallery, Gloucester, Gallery ON, Seoul, Korea and SFAC Main Gallery, San Francisco. In 2008 he was invited to exhibit in the Seoul International Photography Festival and has participated in group exhibitions throughout the country, notable among them: “The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography” at Chelsea Art Museum (New York) and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento. His photographs are in the collections of Santa Barbara Museum of Arts, Iron Museum in Korea, Fidelity Investment Collection, and Wellington Management Collection. He is Professor of Photography at University of California, Davis since 2006.