Korean-American artist Do Ho Suh has a very arresting method of exploring spatial memories: recreating them to scale in brightly colored transparent polyester on a frame of stainless steel tubes. Here's what the ghostly, fabric-based version of his Manhattan apartment and studio looks like.
The installation, which CityLab writer Kriston Capps recently toured, is currently on view as part of a larger exhibition of Suh's work at the Austin Contemporary. It's actually three separate pieces, Apartment A, Corridor and Staircase, and Unit 2, the last of which is on view for the very first time.
Suh first began recreating domestic spaces in 1994. Previous works—like when he recreated his childhood home inside a fabric rendition of the one he lived in when he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and created a rooftop replica of another Providence home—catalogue many the places he's lived in since immigrating to the U.S. in 1991.
Capps points out one of the most incredible things about Suh's style of single-medium recreation: how you can "tease out so much detail from material that is fundamentally immaterial, from the caulk in the bathroom tile to the style of lamps suspended over the sink." This is one of Suh's methods for pulling ordinary spaces out of the realm of the ordinary; presenting the basic elements of a thing, and letting memory and imagination fill it in.
· A New York Apartment, Painstakingly Rendered in Ghostly Fabric [CityLab]
· Sculptor Makes Full-Scale Replica of Home Within a Home [Curbed National]
Loading comments...