Location: El Cerrito, CA
Medium: Photography, video
Website: youngsuh.net
Youngsuk Suh, who also publishes under the name Young Suh, was born in South Korea in 1970 and moved to the United States in 1994 to study photography. He earned a BFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1998) and an MFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001), where he went on to teach large-format photography and digital printing.
In 2006 Suh joined the faculty of the University of California, Davis, where he is now a Professor of Art. He lives in El Cerrito, in the East Bay. He has held a residency fellowship at MacDowell (2010) and a James Irvine Foundation-funded fellowship at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, awarded in support of his ongoing photographic study of California wildfires.
Over two decades Suh has built an interlocking body of work — including Instant Traveler, Forest Invisible, Wildfires, and, since 2011, an extended collaboration with poet Katie Peterson under the umbrella title Can We Live Here? — that has been shown in the United States and South Korea, including exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Mills College Art Museum, and the Datz Museum of Art in Gwangju.
Suh photographs the places where human management of land and natural disaster meet, using a large-format color approach that favors elevated, wide vantage points over close documentary framing. His long-running Wildfires series pictures Californians bathing, rafting, and working in the haze of nearby fires — pairing catastrophe with everyday leisure rather than scenes of destruction, so that the pictures read as unsettled and quietly beautiful at once rather than as disaster reportage.
Since the early 2010s his practice has expanded into text-and-image collaboration with poet Katie Peterson, folding video, performance, and artist books into projects that ask, literally, “can we live here?” — whether in fire country, on a precarious road, or in reimagined folktale landscapes. Across all of it, Suh treats nature not as a wilderness apart from people but as, in his words, a “highly engineered and civilized institution,” and lets the resulting images sit with contradiction instead of resolving it.
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