“The word home has many meanings,” writes Museum of the Home, a London-based gallery space which, since 2011, has been dedicated to the changing shape of domestic interiors over time. “It can be the physical space we live in, or a feeling that goes beyond a specific time or place.” Do Ho Suh (b. 1962) is a South Korean artist whose practice centres around these questions. Since the 1990s, Suh has become known for crafting large-scale fabric sculptures that recreate the places in which he has lived and worked. These pieces vary from small, singular household objects – door handles, plugs switches and light bulbs – through to full scale replicas of architectural spaces, apartments, staircases and hallways.
Suh’s installations, a selection of which are on view at The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), are bright, colourful and playful. Yet they also have a distinctive biographical dimension, rooted in diasporic experiences. “I’m interested in survival techniques, the spaces we carry within, as well as those we occupy externally,” Suh explains. As such, the show looks back to the artist’s childhood and schooling in South Korea, the family home in which he grew up, and relocations to New York, Berlin and London.
As we are introduced to various spaces occupied by the artist as an adult, we are encouraged to ponder our own memories of space. How does it make you feel to look back on, for example, where you grew up, your student accommodation or your best friend’s bedroom? The answers are often deeply emotive, and will be different for everyone. As Guest Curator Rachel Kent notes: “If the body is a vessel and the home – or artist’s studio – is its container, Suh’s works suggest the traces of a thousand lives lived.”
Featured works include Staircase-III (2021), a crimson set of translucent steps that cascade from the ceiling. Elsewhere, Hub encourages MCA’s visitors to walk around and through a series of interconnecting rainbow structures; they replicate transitional spaces such as corridors, entry ways and foyers. “I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination,” Suh told Victoria Miro in 2017. “We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces. But without these mundane spaces that nobody really pays attention to, these grey areas, one cannot get from point a to point b.”
mca.com.au | Until 23 February 2023
Image Credits:
1. Do Ho Suh , Hub series , installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022, polyester fabric, stainless steel , image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © Do Ho Suh , photograph: Anna Kučera
2. Do Ho Suh , Hub series , installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022, polyester fabric, stainless steel , image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © Do Ho Suh , photograph: Anna Kučera
3. Do Ho Suh , Staircase – III , 2010, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022, polyester fabric, stainless steel, Tate: Purchased with funds provided by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2011, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © Do Ho Suh , p hotograph: Anna Kučera
4. Do Ho Suh , Passage/s , 2017, installation view, Victoria Miro, London , polyester fabric, stainless steel, image courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London and Venice, © the artist, photograph: Thierry Bal
