Close to Home: Interview with Do-Ho Suh

The practice of Korean sculptor and installation artist Do-Ho Suh centers around notions of home—its associations with comfort, memory, displacement and identity formation. Recently, he debuted his Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home (2013) installation at the new National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, in which a life-size replication in fabric and wire of his childhood house in South Korea floats inside his former brownstone residence in Providence, Rhode Island.  On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in Hong Kong—and the artist’s second visit to the Fragrant Harbor since the 1990s—Suh met with ArtAsiaPacific to discuss his latest fabric pieces and a potential future project.

Can you speak about the furniture-like sculptures in this exhibition? Why did you choose these objects?

The larger appliances, or furniture, in the main room were fixtures in my old New York apartment. After spending 15 years there, I came to the conclusion that I could create the sense of the space with these anchoring objects. Luckily, the dimensions of the gallery are very similar to my old apartment. The work therefore gives me the feeling of being inside my apartment with the appliances arranged in a similar layout.

Is this feeling of familiarity part of the work for you?

I’m looking to recreate my comfort zone. As a foreigner—no matter what reason you leave—once you depart from home, you have to deal with new environments and spaces all the time, and this sense of unfamiliarity. In a way, my work is coming to terms with that. The whole idea started when I brought my Korean home, which I spent time in as a child, to the United States. It was about creating a comfort zone.

Your sculptures regarding the home tend to be made from a translucent material. Why is this characteristic important?

When I began making these works, the fabric was really important because I was not trying to make exact replicas of these objects or of a house. It was more about capturing the intangible quality of memory. This notion of memory itself is not necessarily solid, it can be quite vague.

But the objects are so detailed.

Yes, the objects are quite detailed and we probably pushed the limit of the fabric, but it’s still not close to the real thing. It was never about making something exact. It was about capturing the time spent with those objects, something that we cannot see in the objects themselves.

Can you talk about the construction process?

The most important process is measuring the space and the object, you have to measure these things really thoroughly. For instance, a refrigerator, you open and close it numerous times a day so you would think that you’re very familiar with it. But once you start to measure it, it’s a totally different story. You begin to understand how the object is made. By measuring, you consume the object in a different way. Having gained some more information about the space, about the object, it gives me an excuse to move on from them.

It sounds quite intimate.  

Exactly. You are kind of reenacting. Every day you probably do things without really thinking. During this process, you really pay attention to these interactions. Especially when you’re making these objects into fabric. 

Who is actually making the works?                          

All the fabric pieces are made in Korea. My first fabric pieces were made in my parent’s place. I made all the prototypes but one seamstress and two assistants helped make the actual pieces. The next project was bigger and more ambitious, and from there, the team started to grow. Now we have around 36 people, some have art backgrounds and some don’t. This not only includes those sewing but also the computer specialists who we now have to translate the measurement into the 3D computer model.

Now that you’re based in London, are you tempted to recreate a version of that apartment?

No, I doubt it. I’ve been in London for three years and now people know my practice revolves around this concept of the home, so I feel like they are expecting something from my London home. But as of now, I don’t know what I am going to do with the fabric pieces. I am working on this idea of a dollhouse for my daughter who is two-and-half years old. It’s an exact replica of our current apartment in London, but of course, it’s very small. It plays on this idea of a home within a home because when she’s playing with that dollhouse, she is actually inside the house that it was modeled after—that could be an interesting thing.

“Do-Ho Suh” is currently on view through January 25, 2014 at Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong.

Sylvia Tsai is assistant editor at ArtAsiaPacific.