ART-PRESENTATION: Do Ho Suh-Passages
Born in Seoul, Do Ho Suh transforms his personal experiences into artworks, particularly his move from South Korea to the USA and then in London, as well as the specific domestic spaces where he has lived, including his childhood home, a house in Rhode Island where he lived as a student, and his apartment in London. Transparency, or the oscillation between opacity and visibility, appears throughout much of the artist’s work, evoking the layering of space and intermediate areas in Korean architecture.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bildmuseet Archive
Do Ho Suh works confront questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality and collectivity. The artist presents “Passages” his first solo exhibition in Scandinavia. The exhibition at Bildmuseet includes an installation of his “Hub” works along with the video “My Home/s” (2014-16) and works on paper drawings in which the artist explores architecture in various ways as physical and imaginary spaces. In his artworks, Do Ho Suh documents carefully the architectural spaces where he has lived and worked (his childhood home in South Korea and apartments and studios in New York and London) in order to reproduce them in full scale as visually striking, sculptural artworks. In transparent fabric structures, he brings to life experiences of mobility and change, of crossing boundaries and moving between different mental spaces and states. The central work in the exhibition is the textile installation “Passage/s”. Do Ho Suh’s installation contains dreamlike portraits of his former homes. They are present but transparent, encouraging the viewer to pass through the ephemeral, dreamlike representation of the artist’s personal history. The 16-metre-long architectural structure runs diagonally across the entire exhibition hall. Three video works in the exhibition are closely related to “Passage/s”. The first video work has the same title and reproduces a movement through a seemingly endless passage or corridor with constantly shifting interiors. In the two versions of “My Home/s”, the camera moves vertically and horizontally through a number of rooms, as if they were in the same building. The line drawing “Entrance, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA” (2015) was made using textile thread embedded in gelatine on hand-made cotton fibre paper and depicts the entrance hall to the artist’s apartment in New York. Do Ho Suh’s drawing “My Homes – 3” (2012) depicts all the homes he has lived in since he was born in 1962 up to and including 2012, from left to right. In this graphite and coloured pencil drawing, the architectural elements are fused into a single entity, one extremely long building which runs like a snake from one side of the 3-metre-long paper to the other. The drawing reproduces this imaginary building from three different perspectives: viewed straight from the side, straight from the top and at an angle from the top.
Info: Curator: Katarina Pierre, Bildmuseet, Umeå Arts Campus, Östra strandgatan 30B, Umeå, Duration: 17/11/17-20/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, Fri 11:00-21:00, www.bildmuseet.umu.se
