A life-size hanok, a traditional Korean house, made of hanji paper has been installed inside a museum. The artist layered hanji over the walls, doors, latticed windows and columns of a hanok and rubbed the surface with graphite and other materials to reproduce its texture. In effect, one bay of a hanok was restored through rubbing. The work is titled "Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home," combining "rubbing" with "loving." For the artist, the act of making the work is itself a way of experiencing and recording space. His most recent piece, "Perfect Home," is a prime example. It reassembles memories and traces of the homes he has lived in across London, New York, Berlin and other cities into a single space. The actual dimensions of the house are reproduced in translucent polyester fabric, with doorknobs, faucets and electrical outlets also made of cloth.
A large-scale retrospective, "Do Ho Suh," opens on the 27th at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul, featuring the leading Korean installation artist, 64, who has long explored home and movement, memory and identity. At a press conference on the 26th, the artist said, "It began with the hanok in Seongbuk-dong, Seoul, where I first lived, and as I lived abroad in New York and Berlin, my thinking about the role and meaning of home expanded." He added, "In the end, I am searching for an answer about 'home' through the 'Bridge Project,' which connects Seoul and New York."
The exhibition is Suh's largest solo show, encompassing some 500 works from his early pieces to his signature and most recent creations. Suh is the son of Suh Se-ok, a master of Korean ink abstraction. After graduating from Seoul National University's Oriental painting department, he moved to the United States to study Western painting and sculpture. Over the past three decades, the artist has used a wide range of media to explore questions about the individual and the community, home and movement, memory and identity.
Suh has continued to meticulously document the homes, rooms, corridors and staircases where he has stayed, and to reproduce them in materials such as fabric, paper and metal. In his work, the home is a place where a person's time, relationships and memories accumulate, and also a trace of a life that moves along with its inhabitant. Work that began in personal experience expands into universal questions about family and community, migration and society, and human existence and identity.
The exhibition opens in a space named "Seed Bank." It gathers works and records from before the artist's formal career, including childhood drawings and sculptures and installations made before he went abroad to study. It amounts to a return to the moment that gave birth to Suh's artistic world. "Unit 516/Unit 516-I/Unit 516-II" is his first fabric work, reproducing at a 1-to-1 scale the space where he lived as a student in the United States. He measured the structure and dimensions of the actual space in fine detail and fabricated it in cloth as if tailoring a garment, turning a fixed architectural space into a portable form.
The exhibition also features work expressing family affection, the most fundamental of human relationships. In "Memory of Love," a new piece unveiled for the first time, pockets cut from his family members' clothing are attached to the inside of the artist's coat, holding objects tied to memories. Early drawings and sculptures, video, installations and miniatures of large-scale works are also widely presented.
What form does the artist give to the "home of the future"? "Perfect Home," his most recent work, is the signature piece of the "Bridge Project," which links different times and places. The project began with an imaginary bridge connecting Seoul and New York, combining and dividing architectural elements from various spaces to consider what future homes and spaces might look like. It extends to questions of relationships and coexistence on a global scale, including society and the environment.
Actor Park Bo-gum donated his voice for the exhibition audio guide, calmly recounting the stories behind the works. Kim Sung-hee, director of the MMCA, said, "I hope this will be a time to reflect anew on the world we live in today and on human life through Do Ho Suh's work." The exhibition runs through Feb. 9 of next year.
