[image]
[title]For many, three decades is a serious chunk of time. It implies places, too many to quantify. It means events too long gone to remember. And, it tells around 10950 days, which will never be repeated. For artist Do Ho Suh, it implies a curatorial challenge, a sifting of work. Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is now taking on the challenge of presenting Suh’s first major solo exhibition, in the Southern Hemisphere, no less, and this summer the world will see how they’ve done it.
Of course, any retrospective could be said to do the same thing, but with Suh, whose work is so intricately connected with place and time, this is more interesting than usual. One of the most prominent contemporary South Korean artists in the world, Do Ho Suh (born 1962), currently lives and works in London. His best-known works feature fabric sculptures (sometimes silk, sometimes polyester) depicting scale models of his former homes. He had lived a somewhat nomadic life until settling in London and starting a family, living in New York, Rhode Island, Berlin and Seoul. His ‘homes’ were later pictured in fabric, at times to scale, and at times with appliances such as ovens, radiators and telephones. Although, he didn’t narrow himself down to textile structures, with his practice remaining as peripatetic as his habitats. It spans into installation, film, drawing, charcoal rubbings and sculpture.
Suh seduces the audience with a perishable dream of another world
His large-scale sculptures are full of intensely personal history. Moments forgotten and faded are met with ones captured, reproduced and repurposed for the white shell of a gallery. His artworks are more than mere memories; while viewers may not share his personal connection to the household objects and space he recreates, there is a universal quality to their nostalgic presence. He creates snap-frozen fragments of time. Like a hazy blue oven and toilet, extracted from the everyday and placed in a glass box, both transparent as each other, both fragments of a memory. Their crumbs at times the size of apartments he once inhabited, scattered on the floor like a fallen cookie from a jar on the shelf.
The notion of “home” is a recurring theme, as Suh’s biographically driven work explores this in a physical and psychological sense. He draws his images of home as broadly as his creative talent stretches. Whether a blueprint of a displaced bathroom basin or an entwined translucent door, Suh weaves a ghostly and translucent image that provides the intimacy of memory in a physical reality. The product may just be an exterior environment, but it is personal, domestic in thought, and sheer in appearance. These “Hub” sculptures and his smaller “Specimens” are intricately rendered and crafted through traditional Korean hand-sewing techniques or through 3D mapping and modeling. Their semi-transparent nature gives the space an extended meaning otherwise lost through closed, opaque doors. They are also lightweight, mobile and physical manifestations.
A big drawcard of the MCA’s retrospective is a major display of the Hub series, which invites gallery visitors to walk around and through a series of brightly coloured, interconnecting fabric structures. Belonging and identity have a new dimension in these replicated “in-between spaces” – corridors, entryways and foyers. The artist strips ‘biographical art’ down to raw material: an organza corridor (with intricately detailed organza ceilings, lightbulbs, etcetera) is not solely chosen for cheapness, but its relation to Korean summer costumes made from the same textile.
View this post on Instagram
Metal Jacket (1992/2001) repeats this pattern, with Suh’s upbringing in Korea informing his practice in adulthood. Referencing Korean hanbok robes, 3000 dog-tags cover a US military jacket fabric liner. Its shining presence reflects an interlinked journey between moments in time, whether it be the tags’ relation to America, or Suh’s experience of conscription in South Korea.
Another exhibition highlight is Staircase-III (2010) from the Tate Collection. Recreated to scale, the brilliant red hand-stitched fabric staircase rises to nowhere and nothing, suggesting the passage of time. It is symbolic of the link and connective tissue between different spaces and cultures, the world above as intangible as the ability to climb those stairs.
The works keep coming. Everywhere and in every shape. Seen for the first time anywhere, and completed just in time to be shipped to Sydney for this show, is a scale recreation of the artist’s childhood home constructed from charcoal rubbings on mulberry paper. With Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), the artist has rendered the exterior of his parents’ home in Seoul, a traditional Korean hanok house with its characteristic tiled, curved roof, through a series of paper rubbings. The time-consuming act of scanning a house for reproduction highlights the intimate connection Suh has to his parents’ home, and its mobility in memory wherever he goes.
In Floor (1997-2000), tiny plastic figures swarm under a glass floor, their aloft arms lifting the surface like a chilling cheer of communist propaganda in North Korea. As you walk across the glass and over the swarm, take a closer look at the custom-printed wallpaper that surrounds it, because this is an artwork too. Who Am We? (Multicoloured) (2000) is printed with multiple tiny portraits sourced from highschool yearbooks, their individuality evident only on close inspection.
It would take far too long to list all the highly-charged, powerful works in Suh’s oeuvre, let alone those in the MCA’s show. It would be impossible to show all of them at once, or at least impossible not to be overwhelmed by their presence. It is peculiar, though, how such different pieces can still evoke a similar spellbound reaction. Suh’s practice encourages the same questioning of our own memory and understanding of self, place, and origins. Fluorescent exoskeletal objects are littered across floors and within walls, and the most powerful aspect of it all is the space they inhabit and create.
Suh creates space for the work, removing the mass of the interior and only showing the skin, an exhibit for only the epidermis
As founding minimalist artist Donald Judd once said: “It’s all about three dimensions and the space inside the boxes, around the boxes, and between them. It’s all about space… you can only make it exist. It’s about seeing and about the actuality of space.”
This statement has particular poignancy when one observes Suh’s constructions. The scale has an impact that cannot be overlooked, but the isolation of the body from the form must not be ignored either. Suh creates space for the work, removing the mass of the interior and only showing the skin, an exhibit for only the epidermis. Ecdysis of inanimate objects. Patient forms, empty and transient like a shadow.
The MCA has produced a riveting show filled with ghostly yet specific interiors. They allude to more than a question, perhaps proposing political commentary, if you so choose to see it.
Suh seduces the audience with a perishable dream of another world. He finds lightness, transparency and structural daring in the thin film that hangs across skeletal structures like mosquito nets. It is a sure thing that audiences will be stunned, the diaphanous works affixing themselves to the minds of the many that will visit the show. They will return home to their own habitat and walk through the work they have created themselves. Equally intense, but unlike Suh’s art, not shared, not revealed.
Do Ho Suh is showing now at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Rocks, until February 28, 2023. Find out more here.