In Do Ho Suh’s (b. 1962) drawing Haunting Home (2019), a figure runs briskly, seemingly headed beyond the corner of the frame. An otherworldly space, rendered in multi-coloured cotton threads, trails in his wake. The building flickers, almost out of focus, but, upon closer inspection, we see it is a hanok, a traditional Korean home. In fact, it’s a rendering of the exact space in which Suh grew up. The structure symbolises what the artist, who emigrated to the USA in the 1990s and later to London, left behind in his native country. “Home started to exist for me once I no longer had it,” he once said.
The artist is known for his translucent fabric sculptures and architectural installations that billow from ceiling to floor. “Home” has been a lifelong preoccupation, and his work channels a personal journey from being a Korean international student at the Rhode Island School of Design to becoming a widely acclaimed, multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited across the world. In 2017, he received the prestigious Ho-Am Prize in the Arts. It is widely considered to be Korea’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize. His artworks mediate the blurred lines between the past and present, carrying the memories of locations that are long since abandoned, but still kept fresh in his consciousness. “A lot came into focus for me when I left Korea. It wasn’t so much that I was homesick, but I was thinking anew about the impact movement has on the body and your sense of self. When I arrived in the USA, I found myself doing two things, both of which relate to the idea of architecture as clothing: I began to measure my space, and I produced paper rubbings of the interiors. It was a response to my sense of displacement and disorientation.”
The transience of living in different places, and the inevitability of perhaps never finding home at all, haunts Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time, a major exhibition at Modern One in Edinburgh. It collates artworks across 25 years, including never-before-seen ink drawings from his sketchbook. The result is a visual autobiographical account of his own story. Whilst Suh calls the personal aspect of his artworks “incidental”, a vulnerability quivers in the sketches. For example, Self-Portrait depicts Suh gazing at the viewer whilst a fantastical house springs from his head. In an interview with the The Art Newspaper, Suh said: “Maybe I was too protective of them, but it feels like the sketchbooks contain everything in my life, they are like a diary, there are so many personal notes inside.”
According to the UN, as of June 2023, 110 million people remain displaced from their homes by force – whether because of natural disaster, discrimination, persecution or war. Sadly, the figure is only set to increase. Moreover, there’s the phenomenon known as “brain drain” – the substantial emigration of skilled professionals, typically to western countries, in search of better job prospects. The flight of human capital incurs a shadowy vacuum for those left behind, a void where family members settle for communicating through FaceTime and phone calls without any immediate hope of physically touching each other. Friends are separated by thousands of miles and shifting life patterns. An even lonelier journey, perhaps, is that of the migrant, who must learn a new language and culture, cultivating a way of life that is effectively decentred from where they were born, disconnecting them from those they love: things may never be the same.
Visitors might feel as if they are passing through the realm of a nostalgic dream as Suh’s spectral installations unfold around them. His universe is filled with homes that only exist as memories, but have been temporarily brought back to life. Home Within Home is one of Suh’s best-known motifs, versions of which have been displayed at MMCA Seoul, Frieze New York and Incheon International Airport. The hanok of Suh’s upbringing in Korea appears as a phantom, suspended within the incandescent bones of a town house in Providence, Rhode Island. It is still and sombre, difficult to truly get your head around unless you step inside. Suh used a “cheap and readily available” transparent polyester – a fabric typically found in Korean summer clothes – to construct this floor-to-ceiling installation. It mirrors two significant buildings: the traditional home that he lived in, as a young child, and the American style dwelling he inhabited as a student. Translucent purple, yellow and blue colours are rarely associated with residential architecture. They speak to the deception of memory, and the tricks that missing a time and place, especially one you can no longer return to, play on the psyche.
For Suh, home is not necessarily rooted to a single place. Much like the experience of travel and immigration, it is fluid and hanging in the balance. “One of the areas I’m most interested in is what we carry with us. How much of ‘home’ is transportable? How tied to notions of site is it?” In his creative practice, home transcends the material constrictions of physical space. Writer and civil right activist James Baldwin said: “You take your home with you, or otherwise, you’re homeless.” Baldwin was alluding to his decision to flee the USA because of state-sanctioned segregation and racism. Instead, he chose to write in Paris, where he became aware of his position as an American. “Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition,” he echoed in Giovanni’s Room (1956).
Suh uses fabric to visualise this idea. It reflects a transitional state – of being pulled between worlds and searching for belonging. It can be cut, dyed, stitched and manipulated. Suh explains: “It’s conceptual. I’m interested in what the transparency of the material communicates in terms of porosity and flexibility. The notion of presenting fabric domestic spaces in a museum appeals to me; they can be slotted together to create passageways from different spaces around the world … The first thing I do after getting an exhibition invitation is look at the 3D models and plans. I think about it architecturally, but also in terms of how I can trouble or challenge its conventions. Some spaces feel very rooted in western imperialist attitudes and I like questioning that. I’m always thinking about sightlines, given that some of the work is see-through. It creates unique problems as well as opportunities. Ultimately though, these installations are fully actualised when there are people within them. That’s when they’re activated.”
Suh is amongst a constellation of contemporary artists explicitly addressing questions of nostalgia, belonging and exile; he cites Ellen Gallagher and Rirkrit Tiravanija amongst his personal influences. These are timely and pressing themes, and right now, John Akomfrah is representing the UK at the 60th Venice Biennale, titled Foreigners Everywhere. He is widely known for his engagement with themes of memory and the experiences of migrant diasporas. Others to note include Ruby Chishti, whose haunting textile, wood and wire mesh sculptures evoke the refugee crisis on the shores of the Mediterranean, whilst Liu Xiaodong makes hyperreal portraits of those displaced in China as well as the wealth and excess of affluent diaspora in London. Rewind to the 20th century, and Arshile Gorky was producing near-absurd abstract paintings to convey the trauma and restlessness of exile after he escaped from the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
Tracing Time, then, reminds viewers of what’s left in the wake of mass upheaval, violent population exchanges and the stilted and uneven flow of human labour to produce capital. In one of his many Rubbing/Loving works, Suh recreates two sites in the city of Gwangju, the epicentre of a 1980 uprising against the military coup d’état of Chun Doo-hwan, a dictator supported by the anti-communist US government. The protest was led by students and culminated in a massacre killing hundreds of people after Chun’s forces raided, tortured, raped and fired upon the people in the city, momentarily quashing the movement and demanding a democratic government in South Korea. Using his trademark practice of rubbing pencil on paper against the walls and surfaces of a theatre and institute in Gwangju, where students congregated, the large-scale installations are a faithful, if immaterial, re-creation of these historic buildings – an apparition of interiors that once harboured real bloodshed and resistance.
This process is deeply emotive. “Often, memories or thoughts are unlocked that I had no access to. It can be very powerful and revealing, and it’s fraught and complicated in many instances.” This applies not only to Suh’s three-dimensional works, but to his moving-image pieces, too. “My work on film archives spaces due for demolition and that can be extremely painful. The buildings are often neglected but there are generations worth of memories being swept away.” Likewise, Reflection (2004), a glowing arch rendered in cellophane blue, recalls the gateway to Suh’s family house in South Korea. In the past, it would have been certain that walking through the arch would lead to a concrete home. Today, after so much time has passed, that fact is now ambiguous.
There can be a dark side to nostalgia, as evidenced by Svetlana Boym, the late Russian-American academic and cultural theorist, who wrote: “The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill.” But Suh maintains a balance between real and imagined, instead offering what Boym termed “reflective nostalgia” – a state of acceptance that these places can be conjured, but never fully restored.
What does the artist hope people will take away from the show? It’s a question Suh doesn’t want to define, leaving answers to the discretion of visitors. “I hope they will reflect on their own relationships with the past and present, memory and movement.” In the 1999 drawing A Perfect Home, a transitional bridge across the Pacific Ocean connects Korea and the USA. A green tree and pink flower blossom around a red thatched house. The impossibility of this dream recalls a scene in Asghar Farhadi’s 2013 film Le Passé (The Past) in which Ahmad, an Iranian man, returns to France to finalise his divorce. “If I hadn’t gone four years ago …” Ahmad says wistfully to a friend, who responds: “If you hadn’t gone four years ago, you’d have gone the next year. If not one year after, then two years after. You didn’t belong here. What did I tell you the first day? You have to choose to be here or there.”
Bearing the weight of that choice is not always easy, even if it is inevitable. Suh’s artworks pay homage to what is lost, but they also echo what could have been. They are a phantasmagoria of the paths we take, and the memories we carry.
Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time Modern One, Edinburgh | Until 1 September
Words: Iman Sultan
Image credits:
1. & 6. Do Ho Suh, Home within Home within Home within Home within Home, (2013). Hanjin Shipping Box Project, MMCA Seoul,13 November 2013 – 11 May
2014. © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin and MMCA Seoul.Photography by Jeon Taeg Su.
2. Do Ho Suh, Home within Home, (2019). © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin and Incheon International Airport, Korea. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su.
3. Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, (2013 – ongoing). © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice. Photography by Chris Payne.
4. Do Ho Suh, Home within Home within Home within Home within Home, (2013). Hanjin Shipping Box Project, MMCA Seoul, 13 November 2013 – 11 May 2014. © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin and MMCA Seoul.Photography by Jeon Taeg Su.
5. Do Ho Suh, Reflection, (2004).
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