Childhood homes can carry an allure, once cavernous spaces that seem to shrink as you grow older, before leaving them behind forever to exist only in your memory. Not so, with artist Do Ho Suh, who returned to his childhood home in Seoul to cover the outside entirely in paper and then do a painstaking rubbing of the entire thing.
The paper was left on for nine months and then peeled away. In the gallery, it has been put together and held with aluminium rods to perfectly recreate the building for a piece called Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home 2013-22. It is one of a number of jaw-dropping works here that look at space and time and how we carry places with us through our lives; usually psychologically, or spiritually, but literally too in Suh’s case.
It's not just his childhood home either, the centrepiece is an installation which combines 1:1 scale fabric replicas of different rooms from his former apartments in New York, London and Berlin. All the rooms are crammed together to form one structure to walk through, where you can see the astonishing detail that has gone into them.
He’s not rubbing this time, but measuring now, down to tiny details, so that inside on the walls there are perfect fabric reproductions of fittings, showerheads, electrical sockets and doors. It is oddly moving. How important spaces become to us, how ingrained the details, which are then usually lost.
We also get to step inside a fabric rendering of a room inside his current London home, which on the inside carries fixtures and fittings - including amazing clusters of lights and fuse boxes - which further demonstrate an obsessive drive to salvage memory. The patience required to accomplish all this is that of a holy man big on interiors.
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There are politics here too. Rubbling/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Threatre (2012), had Suh and a team of helpers don blindfolds and then take rubbings of the interior of a building linked to the Gwangju Uprising, a mass protest against the South Korean military government. Laid out like a floorplan on the wall, it is an eerie, dark work that seems to possess ghosts of the people it held.
His video work is also powerful: Robin Hood Gardens (2018) uses drones and photogrammetry (a technique where images are stitched together to produce a digital version of the real world) to capture a housing block on an estate in East London as it about to be demolished. Put on cinemascope scale it is another ode to lost spaces but with the presence of residents about to be turfed out, carries a weight of lost lives too.
Details. It’s all about the details, and eagle-eyed visitors may spot that the wallpaper covering the walls leading to the exhibition will see that it’s made up of tens of thousands of tiny portraits taken from yearbooks. Melded together, but all different, all carrying memories of spaces long gone.
Do Ho Suh: Walk The House is at the Tate Modern from 1 May to 19 Oct
