Home is What We Carry With Us | Do Ho Suh 🏠

^{Hub Series. Poetry in motion. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

Published on Archlosophy on 25 March 2023.

This essay discusses my experience and thoughts of selected Do Ho Suh’s artworks at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Sydney in January 2023.

Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist born in 1962. He is a renowned artist whose creations have been curated and exhibited across the globe. He works with several mediums including drawings, films, and sculptural works, dealing with themes of identity, migration, displacement, memory, and home.

In this essay, I will talk about some of his works displayed at the MCA, namely ‘Floor’ & ‘Who Am We?’, ‘Hub Series’, ‘Videos’, ‘Staircase III’, and ‘Rubbing/ Loving Project: Seoul Home’.

Floor (1997-2000) & Who Am We? (2000)

^{Floor & Who Am We? Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

These are two separate installations that read as one as you enter the space. As you walk up the ramp of ‘Floor’, the identities of the artworks become apparent. In Floor, thousands of 3D figurines hold up the glass panels in which visitors walk on. On the wall lies Who Am We? , a reddish hue as a backdrop. It’s a wallpaper printed with human faces from Suh’s school yearbook.

The way I look at it, these two installations both complement and contradict each other at the same time. It’s a collision of 3D-printed figurines and 2D-printed faces. Yet, the warm pigment on these 2 installations blended to form one piece of art when looked at from afar. It’s a constant jump between macro and micro scales. You do get the feeling of being a cog in a machine here. Does each face or figurine have its own identity? Or is the masses THE identity? Who am I? Who are we? Who Am We?

^{Floor. Figurines holding up glass panels for visitors to walk on. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

^{Who Am We? Notice the bend as the wallpaper goes around a corner of the room’s wall. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

Hub Series (2015-2018)

A series of detachable and deployable structures made with coloured polyester fabric and stainless steel. Each module is a 1:1 recreation of the room that he has lived in around the world- New York, London, and South Korea. Within each room, all details of the interior are modelled out, including appliances, switches, and fire exit signs, all to an immaculate level of precision.

If you think about the purpose of a room or a space, it has a certain program attached to it. Generally speaking, a dining room is where you eat. A kitchen is where you prepare meals. You get the idea. Each of Suh’s 1:1 modules contained a different room/space. A living room, a hallway, staircase core.

It’s almost as if he’s tearing the original space from his memory, and stitching them together to form a tapestry of transitional spaces. The original function of the rooms and spaces is long gone, with only interior details to give us a clue to what existed originally.

^{Hub Series. A cold, colourful walkway. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

Another interesting thing is when someone walks into the modules, they lose their resolution. They become blurry. This is caused by the translucency of the polyester fabric, but it really made me wonder, is this a clever way to showcase the divide between past and present?

A thin translucent fabric that divides space- in terms of materiality it is a weak form of separation. But add in the element of Time, and suddenly it becomes a strong gesture. People outside the modules can’t see clearly what’s going on inside, but people inside the modules can see its interior details in their full glory, evoking memories from a distant past. Stepping inside the modules equates to travelling to a different temporal plane. It’s the past but still connected to the present by a thread. It’s here, but it’s not really here.

^{Hub Series. A dividing temporal fabric. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

Video Works

There was a screening of this video where Suh further explored the concept of distance across space. The images were taken from where he stayed and worked, all over the world. The video showed time-lapsed images of a room that panned down or to the left to show the next room in a different country.

The thick black lines that acted as a transition from one room to the next room captivated me for some reason. In architectural graphics, poche (hatched to show section cut) is used to denote floor and ceiling thickness. This could be a coincidence, but a very welcomed one.

Again, the concept of space is being condensed to show a different room in a different country being just a ceiling or a wall away.

^{Video Works. Seamless transitions. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

Staircase III (2010)

A red elevated staircase made out of Suh’s signature polyester fabric, directs the eye upwards that terminates on a red plane. The staircase is a 1:1 replica of the one in his New York apartment where he lived for 18 years. It led to his landlord’s apartment, whom Suh had a good working relationship with. Arthur, the landlord, was always accommodating to Suh’s artistic experiments within the apartment and encouraged Suh in his creative endeavours.

Movement is a crucial element in Suh’s works, visitors are encouraged to walk around and through his works. In Suh’s words, “My fabric architectural pieces dealing with 1:1 space are about the body, and about using the body to experience space. The audience has to walk around this space. So until you see every single element, you don’t really know what’s going on.”

^{Staircase III. Ascending to a red plane/ Descending from a red plane. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

This was perhaps my favourite artwork at the exhibition. It exuded a certain charm and reverence to it. The room that the staircase was in and the height of the room that defined the elevation of the Staircase from the ground all contributed to the perception of the artwork. As an art, Staircase III has a very strong geometric form and commanded an indomitable sculptural presence.

^{Staircase III. Worn steps on Stairs. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

The wear on the stair tread, intentional or not, is an intricate piece of detail. Possibly to show the wear and tear on the original wooden framed staircase, and possibly to show the heaviness of Suh’s heart. This work could very well be a tribute to his late landlord. Again, the duality of past and present becomes evident in this work. This time with the severance from the present through the Staircase’s elevation. The translucent red plane also gives an ambiguity to the visitor. Where does the staircase lead to? Who is descending from it? Staircase III becomes a bridge between the past and present.

Rubbing/ Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013-2022)

In this project, Suh mapped his family home, a 1970s replica of a hanok (a traditional Korean house) in Seoul, South Korea by moulding hundreds of mulberry paper to the exterior. Suh then rubbed graphite onto the mulberry paper to collect the exterior details, at first with a stick, then later with his fingertips. All of the exterior materials- from its stone foundation to its clay bricks to its timber roof framing to its terracotta tilework were mapped out to a 1:1 scale. It was an arduous journey that took 9 long years to complete.

^{Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

His identity has been enveloped by the house. Suh lost his fingerprints when he used his fingertips to rub graphite on the mulberry paper. You could say that this project is his identity. Suh mentions that rubbing reveals textures and marks which are linked to his recollections.

In his words, ‘One of the reasons I have revisited the same house over and over again in my art, is that this is where I grew up and where my father spent most of his time. All my upbringing was located there. The house is like a self-portrait, but it is a portrait of my father as well.’

^{Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home. Notice the stains caused by the timber soaked into the mulberry paper. Sydney, January 2023. Photo by author.}

This project was a tribute to his childhood and his father. The mulberry paper absorbed the brown pigment from the timber columns and the orange from the rusted nails. The mulberry sheet contains the essence of the hanok’s original materials. In my opinion, this work has an added dimension to it due to the ‘transference’ of materials and Suh’s identity.

Suh’s quote ‘Home is what we carry with us’ resonates strongly in Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul House.

Final Thoughts

Suh’s works are important for architecture or can be argued that it is architecture itself- at least in the phenomenological sense. His works deal with the perceptions of scale, enclosures, the play with perspectives, and the sequencing of sculptures to create a spatial experience.

Suh’s exhibition was an interesting and unique experience. However, I didn’t get the sense of warmth, nor any notions of Home in his works, just a shadowy afterimage of its true self. In the sculptures of Hub Series and Staircase III, the spaces felt cold, sterile, and distant, despite the warm colours of the fabrics. In Seoul House, the off-white mulberry paper created this ghostly appearance of a massing, too ethereal to provide warmth. Yet I am drawn to these sculptures like a moth to a lamp.

Nostalgia is a powerful, addictive feeling.