They hover, diaphanous, among their solid surroundings like ghosts of structures that have come and gone. These fabric installations by Korean artist Do Ho Suh transform the structures where they’re installed, creating new environments of silk and metal armatures. The artist’s architectural sculptures have been brought together under one roof for ‘Home Within Home‘, an exhibition at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea.
Previously on display at New York’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery, ‘Home Within Home’ is a series of Do Ho Suh’s recent fabric works that explore the the idea of home and the sense of cultural displacement that comes with immigrating to a new place. Splitting his time between South Korea and New York, the artist found that when he returned home, everything seemed different.
This sense of displacement led Do Ho Suh to take measurements of spaces like his childhood home in South Korea so that he could ‘transport’ them to new locations in the form of these fabric sculptures. “It’s my personal journey from Korea to the U.S. and the story of the house that came along with me, or brought me here.”
“It’s quite an unsettling experience, because you feel like you don’t belong anywhere,” Do Ho Suh told Design Boom in 2007. “I guess we don’t really need to belong to a place in today’s society. that is what I like about new york. It’s not perfect, but you can have pretty much anything there. it’s a tough city, but I think it’s the perfect city for strangers, because pretty much nobody is from there.”
