In today’s ever more globalized world, the immigrant experience is a recurrent theme in art, but we doubt anyone’s ever represented it quite as dramatically as ex-pat Korean sculptor Do Ho Suh does in his new NYC exhibition Home Within Home, which is on at the moment at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Fallen Star 1/5, a huge and remarkably accurate scale model of an apartment block that’s been bisected and then swung apart on invisible hinges. The attention to detail is pretty amazing — it’s like a giant doll’s house, with bookshelves, sofas and at least one refrigerator all sliced right down the middle, with the two halves displayed on each side of the building. You can stand for ages marveling at the amount of effort this must have required. And then you walk around behind the building and find that a similar scale model of Suh’s childhood home in Korea seems to have parachuted in from the heavens and demolished most of the apartment block’s rear. The symbolism of cultural displacement is writ large, and heightened by the other piece in the exhibition, a ghostly hybrid of Suh’s old home and his new one, melded together and rendered in strange photosensitive resin. There are images of both after the jump — click through and let us if you love it as much as we do.
Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011. ABS, basswood, beech, ceramic, enamel paint, glass, honeycomb board, lacquer paint, latex paint, LED lights, pinewood, plywood, resin, spruce, styrene, polycarbonate sheets and PVC sheets. Approximately 131″ x 145″ x 300″.
All images courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.
Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011.
Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011.
Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011.
Do So Suh, Home Within Home (Prototype), 2009-2011.
Do So Suh, Home Within Home (Prototype), 2009-2011.
Do So Suh, Home Within Home (Prototype), 2009-2011.
Do So Suh, Home Within Home (Prototype), 2009-2011.
Do So Suh, detail from Home Within Home (Prototype), 2009-2011. Photo sensitive resin.
Do So Suh, detail from Home Within Home (Prototype), 2009-2011.