In November, the South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (b.1962) will exhibit his airy spatial structures created in transparent tulle. He recreates life-size corridors, passages, entryways and intermediate spaces from places he has lived in around the world.
Do Ho Suh strives to touch the emotional register associated with the home and which for him is always in motion. The various spaces which, throughout our lives, become alternating homes and which for him also transcend (country) borders, also come to represent various mental states, precisely as life’s manifold emotional processes. Via these portable architectonic spatialities, Do Ho Suh exhibits his fascination with the concept of “home” seen in the context of a modern human’s global, nomadic existence. What special place is this, what form does this place take and what stories are generated therein? In particular, he examines the psychology that is entailed in feeling at home.
There is something meditative in the way Do Ho Suh works in the creation of his Hubs. He meticulously sews every detail of the rooms such that, for example, door handles and power outlets are placed exactly as they are in the real world space. Studs help to stiffen the material so that the large see-through planes can stand vertically in the air. Oddly and precisely, they give an impression of weightless corridors stitched together in elongated galleries. Details such as buttons and skirting boards appear as one moves through the spaces, like a kind of memory that leaps from the rooms that make up phases of the artist’s life. Somewhat similar to a dream where reality, past and present converge.