Do Ho Suh is an artist based between London, New York, and Seoul who is known for his intensive work with architecture’s experiential, mnemonic, and psychological dimensions, engagements that often take the form of full-scale fabric re-creations of the spaces in which he has lived. Here, he discusses rubbing/loving, 2016, a large-scale piece that began with a painstaking process of wrapping all of the surfaces of his former apartment with white paper—including walls and cabinets, light switches and door handles, as well as his house key in its lock. Suh then used colored pencils and pastels to create rubbings on the sheets, in a process that discloses and memorializes all of the home’s details. After documenting the entire process, Suh vacated the apartment and has placed all the paper fragments in storage while he explores the possibility of exhibiting the reassembled work.
I FOUND THE APARTMENT ON WEST TWENTY-SECOND STREET before I even moved to New York. It was in the spring of 1997, a couple of months before my graduation from Yale. A friend of a friend was moving out and offered to put me in touch with the landlord, who lived in the building. It’s a typical New York townhouse, and he was renting out the ground floor. This was a year or two before all the SoHo galleries had started moving to Chelsea, and it wasn’t quite an art neighborhood yet. I remember the landlord was excited about the fact that I was an artist—although he also joked that he was worried I couldn’t afford the rent—and we became good friends. It is amazing how quickly the neighborhood changed after that.
I had already conceived my first fabric architecture piece while I was in grad school—I made a small-scale version of my studio in muslin. But that was just a test, because I was already thinking of much larger spaces. Soon after moving to New York, I was invited to participate in an exhibition in Seoul. Its theme was the home, so I decided to make my new apartment in fabric. I needed precise measurements of the space in order to create the pattern for the fabric, I made rubbings with graphite on paper of some of the walls, and then traced the patterns from those sheets of paper. That was the moment I got the idea for this current project—oh, maybe I could do a rubbing of my entire space! But it was cluttered with so much stuff. It wasn’t practical at the time…
–As told to Julian Rose
Image: Do Ho Suh, rubbing/loving (detail), 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable.
