Do Ho Suh’s softly glowing, colorful installations leave spectators all over the world breathless and sentimental, and I am no exception following my experience with the artist's exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Suh painstakingly made impressions of his New York apartment's every surface, using paper, blue colored pencil, and a gentle rubbing technique. He then used the "blueprints," along with sheer silk and a sort of metal framework, to construct a dreamlike but precise replica of his home and its fireplace, bathtub, furnaces, and even smoke detectors. The results are truly, as stated previously, breathtaking.
Do Ho Suh's time-consuming projects seem admirable in the difficulty of their methods alone. His sculptures, as well as his flat work, flawlessly interweave color and line. His three-dimensional marvels use straight lines, as asserted in the frameworks, and fill these neat shapes with solidly saturated, brilliant colors, harmoniously contrasting in hue. His Specimen Series especially showcases the dancing relationship between these sheer colored fabrics and light. Much of his flat artwork, including watercolor piece Home within Home, mirrors these tidy lines and clean colors. Several other pieces, such as Home Sweet Home, use embroidery to display messier, more tangled lines and sometimes the haphazard mixing of colors. Suh's skillful use of various art elements in such meticulous techniques definitely provoke admiration. The true value of his work, however, lies in the feelings that it evokes.
While most art exhibits make my inner ego whisper "I want to do that," Do Ho Suh's exhibit makes my inner ego shut up. I do not admire the artwork with a desire to learn to someday recreate similarly beautiful brushstrokes. I instead do not want to leave the pieces and want to continue imagining life in their floating spaces. I do not want to leave, and yet I also want to break free from my everyday routine and live in new places, taking the memories of my previous homes with me, as Do Ho Suh's silk apartment confection documents the memory of his previous home. The nomadic ideas of Suh's pieces resonate with my personal life.
In 1991, Suh moved from South Korea to Rhode Island, giving him the unique perspective of a real nomad. While I myself have never moved abroad, my parents, brother, and sister moved to the United States from the Philippines twenty-something years ago. I wonder if, as a fellow Asian-American immigrant, Suh experiences the same disjointed empowering joy for his new home and underlying melancholy about the loss of his old one that several immigrants who I know possess. His silk rooms make me dream about the inescapable prejudice faced regardless of my parents' high status as doctors or Suh's acclaim as a globally celebrated artist, the knowledge that true home lies somewhere else, and my inner tug that yearns to find the true definition of home.
Having been interested in the amorphous concept of home since a young age, I have searched for answers in various religious texts and literature. I found one answer to be so true that I almost got a portion of it tattooed on my ankle. My wonderfully loving father, however, said no. Nevertheless, Maya Angelou once wrote:
"I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the
dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of ones eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe. Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant."
After liberation via Suh's artwork and recognizing its remarkably cathartic nature, I may have to get two tattoos and see more art exhibits.
