Young Suh
Mateo Was Born Just After Tanya’s Dad Died, 2017

Archival pigment print, 32 x 40 inches
Edition 1/5 + 2AP, signed, verso
Framed
Courtesy of the artist
Estimated value: $4,000

The photograph is part of the series "Scenes from a Forest." Originally commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, the work explores portraits of contemporary families, forming diverse identities.

The project is inspired by the folktale “The Souls of Trees.” In the tale, Reb Nachman, brought by intuition and the spirits to the house of a couple to discern why they can’t have children, has a dream-vision that tells him that the angel of conception, Lailah, holds herself back from the house because of “the sighs and moans and cries of the souls of trees that were cut down too soon.” His counsel: they must plant trees, twice as many as they cut down, and after three years they will be blessed with a child.

The folktale forges a spiritual equivalency between people and trees. An obvious reading manifests an environmentalist interpretation—our ability to create life depends on our care of nature. This ethical intuition stands behind this project but is less the central goal than an assumed truth. I am interested not simply in what we should preserve but in making a picture of what is happening now in our landscape: what happens spiritually when we equate people and trees in visual format, and, by extension, what happens when we equate the idea of the forest with the idea of the extended family? The notion of a “family tree” from root to branch is usually considered generational, temporal, vertical—but what about our extended families living in the present, perishable, at different ages, just as trees in a forest, a row? What happens when you try to take a picture of a family and a forest together? Can they even fit together?

About the Artist:
Young Suh

Young Suh is a visual artist and storyteller. For the past 10 years he has been using photography, video, language, and handmade books to tell stories about human life and the difficulties of our existence on earth.

Young Suh was born in Incheon, Korea. His major projects include Forest Invisible; Can We Live Here? Stories from a Difficult World; Scenes from a Forest, and Instant Traveler. His work has been exhibited at Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Contemporary Jewish Museum and San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford, MS; and Haines Gallery, San Francisco. He is currently a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at University of California, Davis.

Website: youngsuh.net
Instagram: @young_suh_studio