What's On / Event Calendar

Do Ho Suh, Almost Home

16 Mar 2018 - 05 Aug 2018

Do Ho Suh, Hub-01, Ground Floor, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London N1 7SB, UK; Hub, Main Entrance, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA; Hub, 3rd Floor, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London N1 7ST, UK, 2016, polyester fabric and stainless steel armature. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Do Ho Suh’s immersive, dreamlike work explores the nature and meaning of home, fastening ties between personal space and shared experience. Encountering his large-scale fabric sculptures is both deeply familiar and profoundly alien as the ordinary details of everyday life dissolve into ethereality.

Do Ho Suh ‘Almost Home’ is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work on the East Coast, in America. It features large-scale installations of the artist’s brightly hued ‘Hub’ sculptures—intricately detailed, hand-sewn fabric recreations of homes where Suh has lived from around the world—along with several drawings and a series of semi-transparent replicas of household objects called “Specimens.” The Hubs comprise a series of conjoined rooms and passageways that visitors can enter and experience from the inside, including a new work depicting the artist’s childhood home in Seoul that debuts in the exhibition.

Suh was born in Korea and moved to the United States at the age of 29 in 1991, and he currently lives between New York, London, and Seoul. He crafts his works using traditional Korean sewing techniques combined with 3-D modeling and mapping technologies. Suh sees these works as “suitcase homes,” so lightweight and portable they can be installed almost anywhere.

His works transform the familiarity of a domestic space into a liminal one, where ‘home’ is both an idealized concept and physical reality. Through these spaces, Suh examines how home and identity are ever-evolving concepts in today’s global society, and how culture, tradition, migration, and displacement intersect as we construct our ideas of selfhood and origin.

The exhibition is organized by Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art. It is the latest in a series of projects at the museum that situates the art of the United States in a global context.

EVENTS AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS

15 Mar 2018 Dicke Contemporary Artist Lecture with Do Ho Suh
18 Apr 2018 Do Ho Suh Gallery Talk
21 Apr 2018 21st Century Consort: Memory Lane
12 May 2018 Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Family Day

※ This article was originally posted in Smithsonian American Art Museum and reposted on TheArtro.