I was fortunate enough to be able to see his solo exhibition at the Victoria Miro and it really blew me away. Some of his ideas and execution of those ideas, the ways in which his pieces could be perceived and understood, as well as techniques he has used resonate with what I am interested in.
It is with the same elegant economy of conceptual means, focusing on simple yet transformative acts of repetition, that Suh treats the complex psychological and physical architectural structures of the concept of 'home'. In work for which he is widely known, the artist meticulously constructs proportionally exact replicas of dwelling places, architectural features, or household appliances – kitchen sinks, toilets and microwaves – from stitched planes of translucent, coloured polyester fabric. Often reflections of places the artist has inhabited, such as his childhood home or Western apartments, these delicately precise, weightless impressions seem to exist between imagination and reality. Suh has spoken of the distinctive openness to the environment of Korean homes; more than repositories of personal memory or nostalgic projections, his works respond to the indistinct boundaries between psychic interior and objective exterior, which make of home an ongoing lived function rather than a physical structure.
His one-to-one scale of physical structures, which was exhibited at the gallery I visited, of passages and corridors of sorts delicately made with translucent fabric gives form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities. It was really fascinating to see silhouettes, figurative shapes uniformly meandering through this corridor of colourful polyester fabric when viewing from beyond the installation itself. In this piece though it isn’t his greatest concern, concepts regarding transparency which relates with Lee ByungChul’s theories pervades and exists. It was a totally different way of conveying and playing around with obscuring and revealing things, he made it a multi-sensory experience for the viewer which is something that I aspire to be able to create in the future.
Suh also introduces a new process to produce his large-scale two-dimentional drawings using gelatin tissue sewn in the same way as his architectural fabric pieces. Once immersed in water the gelatin dissolves, leaving behind a trace, a skeletal framework of what the form once was. They are highly visceral works of art, their translucent and ghostly nature making me want to pursue a similar technique when creating surfaces to project onto since there is a distinguishable layered and structured quality to them especially when viewed up close.
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