style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>People entering a space where Do-Ho
Suh’s best-known work, the diaphanous, tent-like "Seoul Home/L.A.
Home/New York Home/London Home" is installed, inevitably crane their necks and smile in
delight like children seeing a large balloon float up to the ceiling. A
life-size, three-dimensional silk reconstruction of his childhood home, itself
modeled after a 19th-century “scholar’s house” built on palace
grounds, Seoul Home (1999) is seductive in its beauty and handmade charm. But as with so
much of the 41-year-old Korean’s work, the first impression of simplicity and
literal lightness gives way to more poignant, even haunting sensations that
hint at the power of his underlying themes.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Seoul Home
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>is both a monument and a new
structure in its own right, an evocation of tradition and of the postmodern
condition. While the piece hangs tantalizingly out of reach, close observation rewards
the viewer with intricately worked, to-scale roof beams, window frames, even
door latches. Suh worked with elderly Korean seamstresses known as ‘national
treasures’ to learn techniques of stitching and ornamentation, and had his
material custom-dyed to a shade of celadon used for the ceiling of scholars’
homes
class=MsoFootnoteReference>[1]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref1′>. The translucency and ephemerality of his
chosen material speak of tradition or rootedness in a culture – think of rice
and mulberry-paper sliding walls and screens, the fluidity and permeability of
inside and outside in much eastern architecture
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Suh came to America in his late
20s, and his elucidations of his work have a disarming directness. He commonly
describes the impetus for Seoul Home as a desire to pack his home in a suitcase and bring it
with him around the world. “I don’t really get homesick, but I’ve noticed that
I have this longing for this particular space and I want to recreate that space
or bring that space wherever I go.” But the magical thinking inherent in this
idea carries an unmistakable note of melancholy. Seoul Home
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, unlike Ho’s real home, is an
empty space, a wispy re-creation, insubstantial as a
hope.
Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1962, Do-Ho Suh came to the U.S.
in 1991. Since then he has lived in transit, juggling countries, cultures, and
languages as he shuttles between his family home in Seoul and his apartment in
New York City. Responding to this phenomenon, which he calls “transcultural
displacement,” Suh has created homes that he can literally pack in a suitcase
and carry with him.
345 West 22nd St., Apt A, New York, NY 10011 USA
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is the title of one such piece.
The life-size replica of Suh’s Chelsea apartment is constructed—more precisely,
sewn—with remarkable specificity. The viewer can enter and see the fireplace
and bookshelves, switches and light sockets, stove, refrigerator, toilet, and
sink. Everything is meticulously sewn from transparent nylon fabric. Light
flows through the walls creating an insubstantial effect that is reminiscent of
eastern architecture in which rice paper screens are used to separate spaces.
The effect also mirrors the use of mosquito netting in Korean homes. “In the
summer in Korea, you put up a mosquito net. It’s like a tent. In your room. And
you open all the windows and doors. So it’s like a space within a space, and
it’s translucent.”
The translucency and ephemerality of his chosen material
speak of tradition or rootedness in a culture – think of rice and
mulberry-paper sliding walls and screens, the fluidity and permeability of
inside and outside in so much Eastern architecture But they also imply a kind
of displacement, a re-emergence of things no longer present, recollected in a
new moment of profound ambivalence.
style=’mso-special-character:line-break’>
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn1′>
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>[1]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn1′>
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> “On the ceiling you have this sky
blue or jade colored wallpaper. It symbolizes the sky or universe. That house
is for the scholar, so when they study in that room the color allows them to think
about the universe or a bigger space, things like that. So I used that color
for my piece.” PBS.org, Art:21 series, Season 2, Fall 2003 |
