A man runs alongside the underside of a drawing, trailing a whole bunch of rainbow-coloured threads behind him. By some means they’re embedded within the paper. All join upwards to a small wood home with a pagoda roof that drifts within the air like a parachute behind him. Is it slowing him down, maybe breaking a harsh touchdown, or would possibly it increase him again up?
The theme of this terribly lovely exhibition on the Scottish Nationwide Gallery of Fashionable Artwork in Edinburgh is completely easy but unendingly complicated – the enigma of dwelling. Is it a spot, or a sense, a constructing or a metropolis, a short lived condominium or a imaginative and prescient within the head?
This has been the regular preoccupation of the good Korean artist Do Ho Suh for nearly 30 years. Born in Seoul in 1962, to a household who lived within the very home you see in that first work, Suh studied conventional Korean artwork for a decade earlier than migrating to the US. The whole lot he makes is delicate but tensile, gentle however profound, and all the time underpinned by his sleek draughtsmanship.
And all the things runs backwards and forwards in time – from the place he as soon as lived to wherever he resides now. A steady undulating line, in a single work, is in actual fact minutely inflected like a pictorial graph to explain in every single place he has ever lived on the planet – a narrative with out finish.
The Korean home reappears on a regular basis. It’s a balloon, lifting him as much as the clouds. It’s a dream within the wind, or a harness attaching him again to the previous. The rainbow threads, laid into the tender cotton paper when moist, stream from him or tangle him up of their wonderful colors, embodiment of the very thought itself.
My Properties, from 2010, anthologises all types of ideas: the home that runs by means of his torso like an additional organ, the home that radiates out of his head, or lies balanced on his shoulders, that has legs – the artist’s personal – upon which it walks. There are even rubbings, in colored pencil on mulberry paper, of the inside of his household’s conventional hanok home, with its wood fittings and its panelled doorways: a lifesize dwelling remembered, and bodied forth, on and in fragile paper.
“Dwelling began to exist for me,” Suh has stated, “after I not had it.” The artist landed first in Windfall, Rhode Island, the place he needed to begin over again as a scholar, in 1991. He offers form and kind to this craving for dwelling. There are his dwelling rubbings, because it have been, and lots of beautiful recreations in paper of his household’s garments, someplace between chrysalis and shroud, in illuminated circumstances.
In 2012, he put in a clapboard home on the highest of the engineering constructing on the College of California San Diego. It balances at a frighteningly precipitous angle, as seen in an enthralling movie in Edinburgh, as if alighting like a chicken from on excessive. Our sense of dwelling would possibly fly away at any second; we’re all, successfully, displaced.
However the works for which Suh first discovered fame relate to the brownstone constructing in Manhattan, the place he lodged for a number of years. There’s a marvellous picture of its facade on this present: exact as a blueprint, and certainly stitched in translucent blue material on the web page. Behind it (and visual by means of it) lies an incredible tangle of colored silk threads, which at one level maintain the vestige of a determine – the shadows of all the things that occurred (and maybe was felt) there.
Suh is staggeringly varied in his desires and visions – this present stretches by means of many galleries with out as soon as flagging in its unceasing invention – but in addition in his evolving media. He works in charcoal, unleashing photographs of burning buildings, seen by means of haze or smoke. He works in watercolour to catch reminiscences by the tail. There are full-scale 1:1 replicas of fittings in his West twenty second Avenue flat sculpted in silk, nylon and even clear gelatin – a diaphanous basin, a ghostly gentle swap, backlit with LED in order that they glimmer just like the platonic beliefs of those peculiar but important objects.
And proper on the centre of Tracing Time, which fills the entire of the large floor ground at Fashionable One, is a lifesize set up of houses inside houses inside houses. All is created in clear colored material that defines the halls, corridors and doorways of Suh’s successive residences, together with his current dwelling in London, making them successfully materials in each sense, but as weightless as air. Guests are inspired to stroll by means of an set up that’s architecturally explicit and but virtually invisible: to cross by means of a floating reminiscence.
Suh has stated that he desires “to hold my home, my dwelling, with me on a regular basis, like a snail”. Although we could discover the common in every single place in his artwork (who hasn’t had desires that happen of their childhood dwelling?), it’s also a memoir by different means. What’s the best dwelling for him? In a single work, it’s a hanok home sitting halfway throughout a bridge between Korea and the US: an impossibility hanging above an engulfing ocean.
A self-portrait on this present presents Suh alone, silk threads speeding up from his head; after which once more together with his landlord, Arthur, whose threads are poignantly tangled in late dementia. One other reveals him like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, a number of Suhs radiating spherical and spherical in a circle till they meet themselves nose to nose.
There isn’t a single self on this work, no fastened dwelling on this terrific present. Suh’s artwork is as unique as his concepts are finally non secular. The whole lot is round, for him. Just like the working man in the beginning, individuals are merely passing by means of place and time – by means of these worlds, these homes, these houses: all of us being with out starting or finish.
