Fingerprints, long regarded as immutable markers of identity, are unique to each individual and remain unaltered across a lifetime, unless damaged at the deepest of layers. In the creation of his art, South Korean artist Do Ho Suh lost his own, surrendering these very markers of identity to his artistic process, in a desire to capture the memories of the past spaces he has lived in. Suh explores how the different places and buildings that he has inhabited have shaped him; through ‘rubbings’, thread-drawings, and translucent polyester architecture, the collection of installations that make up Suh’s exhibition operates as a portable medium for memory.
Indeed, for his Rubbing Project, Suh wrapped the exterior of his childhood home, a traditional Korean hanok, in mulberry paper and rubbed graphite across it, tracing not only the architectural details but also the house’s marks, ageing and weathering: all evidence of life is transcribed from the house’s walls onto the paper. Joined and mounted on a lightweight aluminium armature, the sheets are reinstalled as a freestanding, full-scale shell of the house. As well as transferring the memories held by the space to a physical dimension, thus making them tangible, this act of care and retrieval allows Suh to unlock forgotten memories as he navigates the space. He describes it as a deeply moving process and an act of exploring ‘where memory actually resides’.
The title Rubbing was inspired by Suh’s initial difficulties with the English language as a Korean speaker. The title plays on Korean phonetics: ‘R’ and ‘L’ map to the same consonant thus rendering ‘rubbing’ and ‘loving’ homophones. This caring process of rubbing merges the identity of the artist and the house to imprint memory onto the paper, and it is almost as if this transfer partly effaces both. While Suh lost his fingerprints, the space is left devoid of evidence of life as the marks, scuffs, and stains on the walls are lifted onto the paper. Reinstalled as a portable shell, the paper becomes a tangible placeholder for lived experiences and materialises the memories that Suh associates with the home he grew up in.
One of his most striking installations is a rubbing carried out on the inside walls of an old theatre that lay empty after the Gwangju Uprising, a mass protest against the South Korean military government in 1980. The brutal suppression of these protests was heavily censored by the government, and thus Suh and his collaborators worked blindfolded as they carried out the rubbing. Limiting his testimony purely to the tactile senses, Suh turns to the walls as witnesses, and relies on their markings to speak to the absence of the real events of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea’s official collective memory. Rather than reconstructing a walk-in replica of the room, Suh unpacks it and installs the rubbed sheets flat against the wall. These graphite-dark panels are a somber outlier amongst the exhibition’s luminous, colourful installations.
In contrast to the rest of his exhibition, rooted in architectural precision and control, Suh experiments with drawing using thread, a technique that leaves room for ‘little accidents and chances’ and that resists the artist’s full control over the outcome. He stitches coloured filament on water-soluble gelatine paper, then transfers it onto wet handmade paper, so the carrier dissolves and the threads bind into the fibres. Working in this way, Suh creates a series of mesmerisingly colourful thread drawings; two of these, Haunting Homes and Blueprint, are my personal favourites of the exhibition. Haunting Homes shows a figure running along the lower edge of the sheet, trailed by hundreds of rainbow-coloured threads that converge into a small house hovering above him, its shape reminiscent of Suh’s own childhood home. This confused cluster reads at once as parachute and as kite; it is ambiguous whether the tether is pulling against the figure or cushioning a fall. In Blueprint Suh depicts the profile of a building front, its blue colour reminiscent of a plan or blueprint, while behind it a vaguely human shape emerges from a tangle of multicoloured threads. Both artworks evoke the messy and mutable life that inhabits solid and defined structures.
At the centre of the exhibition lies Suh’s Nest/s: life-sized rooms and spaces stitched from translucent nylon mesh, each traced from buildings he has inhabited in Seoul, New York, London and Berlin. Visitors are invited to walk through these fabric architectures, which read as a single continuous passage through the artist’s life, despite their deep dissonance. Shapes and proportions are mismatched; doorways meet at impossible angles; panels in differing colours quietly recall traditional Korean palettes. The material’s translucency conveys the fragile, intangible nature of memory: thresholds designed to separate behave more like veils than walls. These spaces, which could never coexist outside this logic of memory, are bound together by the artist who has lived through each and the viewer who now walks them. Suh’s meticulously obsessive detailing of mundane everyday fittings (hinges, light switches, radiator grilles, vents) is intricately stitched, highlighting how the objects we barely notice, yet constantly touch, can be custodians of memory. In Nest/s, the stitching is left visible at every joint, echoing a splintered identity and insisting that what feels continuous is, in fact, held together by seams.
Ultimately, Suh seems to be caught in a nostalgic desire to capture the past spaces he has inhabited; perhaps, this serves as a discordant embracing of his splintered sense of identity. Suh’s characteristically tactile artistic process allows him to materialise his memories of these spaces, and to make them tangible. ‘Walk the house’ is a Korean expression that refers to the ability of hanoks, traditional Korean houses, to be disassembled and reassembled in a different location. For Suh, this expression represents how we can carry different places within ourselves across space and time, and this exhibition embodies that idea, acting as a portable archive of the memories associated with places he considers to be home.
Hello! My name is Paolo, and I am a first-year in the HEC-Bocconi Double Program. As a child, I fell in love with reading thanks to Cressida Cowell’s ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and never stopped; nowadays, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Kerr, and Donna Tartt are amongst my favourites. My main interests in writing lie in politics and political economics, society, culture, and everything in between. When I am not reading, I am playing football or exploring my newfound cooking skills as a uni student.
