[Title] Reflection
[Artist name] Suh Do-Ho
[Date] January 22 – April 3, 2005
Reflection
Suh Do-Ho, a Korean artist based in New York, began making his “fabric-architecture” series in 1994 using thin materials such as nylon and silk. His works invite the viewer to reflect on transitions within space, time and culture.
We are always moving from place to place, from town to town, or from country to country, constantly traversing myriad boundaries.
This series springs from the following curiosity: in the midst of perpetual spatial transition, how much of one’s own space can a human being retain?
The transparent architecture reproducing the artist’s own New York apartment or family house in Seoul resembles a cast-off shell of a cicada.
The audience feels this soft architecture to be their own homes, noting minute details such as the gas oven or a door knob. Walking through these works, they relive their common memories of “home.”
Suh’s theme in “Reflection” is the gate of his family house.
As in the fabric-architecture series, the gate represents a personal motif for the artist, but the object here takes on an additional symbolic meaning.
A gate is a place of passage built outside the house or on a threshold. It serves as a boundary dividing one place from another, and also as a point of control of comings and goings.
What is beyond the gate, however, is never absolutely the “outside”; the space transforms into the “inside” as soon as it is seen from the opposite perspective. The gate thus creates a phenomenon in which the two opposing aspects are inseparable.
“Reflection” signifies an isolated moment of a ritualistic event in his life. The double gates, which represent a threshold to and from a personal space, lead to a moment of rapid transition within a personal landscape.
This site-specific reconstruction of architecture begins to offer a reading of phenomenal boundaries, both physical and subconscious. This multiple reading of the installation may be a continuation of the ritual of the artist’s past and present.
“Reflection” is meditative in its intentions and affects, yet is an object clearly defined in a space.
The ambiguity of direction and orientation allows viewers to yet again reactivate this vignette of the artist’s spatial memory.
The blue gate floats before the eye.
No one can touch nor pass through it.
As merely an architectural outline without function, the gate gives us an eerie sense of reality with its mirage-like transparency and elaborate detail.
This sense of ambivalence and ambiguity is perhaps the gate that we pass through in the “Reflection” exhibition at Le Forum.