The South Korean artist Do Ho Suh is making his presence felt in Hong Kong this week with an exhibition of new works at Lehmann Maupin in the Pedder Building (until 13 May). His Exit series of white polyester sculptures—including ghostly replicas of light switches and a fuse box—is also on show with the gallery at Art Basel in Hong Kong.
Suh has lived and worked in Seoul, Berlin and New York, focusing in his work on themes such as dislocation and transience. “I see life as a movement through many different spaces,” he tells The Art Newspaper.
The exhibition centres on a three-channel video installation called Passage/s: The Pram Project, which reflects Suh’s current adopted city, London. The footage, which captures the sights and sounds of the streets around the artist’s home, was shot on three GoPro cameras attached to the sides and top of his daughters’ pushchair.
“The film shows us always on the move, capturing our travels over two-and-a-half years,” Suh says. “It’s our journey together—we speak and sing in Korean and English.” The artist also splices in imagery from his home city of Seoul. The work is “a comment on his experience of crossing cultural and geographical boundaries, expressing the transient nature of the Suh family’s life”, a spokeswoman for the gallery says. New small-scale drawings by the artist are also on view.
The three-channel video installation captures the streets close to Suh’s home. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong
Meanwhile, Suh has created a unique memorial of his former apartment and studio in Chelsea in New York—which he occupied for 20 years—by rubbing every surface of the rooms with coloured pencils and pastels on to white paper. He aims to reconstruct the New York interior in the next few years.
“The plan is for visitors to enter the reconstruction as if they were entering the apartment,” Suh says. The artist moved to the four-storey brownstone residence on West 22nd Street in 1995 and began rubbing the interior around three years ago, with the landlord’s permission. He had to give up the space in November last year, after his landlord died.
“The project is about memory and my time in that space. Rubbing reveals textures and marks, which are linked to my recollections,” Suh says.
He began with the ground floor and basement of the apartment, known as the “blue room”, which he rented from 1995 to 2010. His studio, occupied from 2010 to 2016 (the “yellow room”), was on the same floor, along with the “pink” corridor. The three spaces were rubbed in coloured pencils. The rest of the house, including the staircases, was rubbed with pastels.
The project tested the artist physically. Suh worked alone on the blue room but used assistants for the other areas. “With the pencils, there is a distance between you and the surface—perhaps a matter of inches—but the pastels touch the surfaces. My fingertips touched every part and were rubbed away,” he says.
The paper impressions have been archived at Suh’s studio in Brooklyn. The artist stresses that the pieces will “take another couple of years” to put together.
• Do Ho Suh: Passage/s, Lehmann Maupin, 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central (until 13 May)