108. DO HO SUH - A SPACE BETWEEN OCCUPANCY AND OPACITY.
Walk The House, Tate Modern - LONDON.
Do Ho Suh, Staircase, 2016. Gelatine tissue and thread embedded in paper, 355 × 229 cm. © Do Ho Suh, courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, London and Seoul and Victoria Miro. Private Collection.
To enter a house that Do Ho Suh built or rather stitched, papered or drew, is to return to a time which exists in all of us, a time often long forgotten - a time which does not tick forward, rather it moves as clouds drift, a bruise develops or a crayon glides on the promise that there is always another sheet of paper.
A time which is returned to in a flash, within the subconscious layers of a dream, triggering a memory only to be forgotten on waking.
Empty rooms are viewed as if for the first and last time simultaneously, reminding of the beginning or end of a period of occupancy. Fire extinguishers and telephones rest translucently in their domestic positions, these replicas crisply defy reality. Familiar and yet as a shed snake skin, moulted to transience - imply a state change - a reminder that nothing lasts forever.
And so to the opacity of his organza choices - choosing predominantly materials which defuse light as so to appear metaphorically cloudy, veiled or in dilution from a concentrate - within a period of evolution or ceremonial processing. Sensed within the sheer layers which form a protective membrane to a world outside these tender walls, tinted as a windscreen's shield which dims a reality. These spaces appear as temporal time capsules - amorphous as bodily sacs - the original home, within which every being grows, fragile as a protective skin before the labour of birth. Where colours are neon against the brightest whites of clinical lights. Are we guests within these homes of time, or are we, in fact, the cells that construct them and the landscapes and elements that allow for their existence?
Within these translucent layers, which at times are positioned over one another, forming colour combinations, indicating possible overlaps of experience, indefinable when viewed or lived from within and yet more condensed when seen from afar. As with life, when, so often, the future is indeterminate and yet the past can seem more specific - more linear. As to touch the rings of a severed tree, imagining the storms and summers of growth which permeate to pattern indelibly. To see the defined stratum within sedimentary rock - beautiful and yet created under extreme pressure and conditions over millennia.
A staircase severed from the ceiling to fall silently, as lightly as a shadow, as heavy as a broken heart.
The clatter of this personal demolition - speechless as to crumble to rubble - changing states from ergonomic to sediment in one momentary motion - watching in a state of shock, where the senses are heightened to see within bleeding disbelief, unable to hear the cacophony of change of such unthinkable permanence.
The gossamer drawings which present a luminous state of surrender - fascinate for their vulnerability - created as if by chance - caught moments - portraits of the familiar re positioned as deflated remains - evidential and flailed - Not with the humiliation of Oldenburg - or the bravado of Koons - but the anti ego of a pressed flower within the pages of a diary, kept in solemn remembrance. These ephemal fleetings bear witness to a state of realisation - the artists preserved reflections embedded lifesize as to overwhelm still further - raw and fibrous in their loud silence.
Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home, 2024 (Detail). Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. Courtesy of the artist. © Do Ho Suh.
Do Ho Suh Walk The House - Tate Modern: 1st May - 19 October 2025.
With thanks to Perry Stewart and Dr. Kyung Hwa Shon.