Do Ho Suh at the Leeum Museum

Mindy and I went to the Leeum Museum to see the Do Ho Suh show today. Do Ho is the artist at the IMA that did the piece with all the brightly colored toy figurines holding up the acrylic floor. That piece has been a favorite since we first saw it. This current show was entitled a home within a home and featured 3 different installations and several sketches and maquette pieces for the larger installs.

The first installation we saw, Do Ho had created the different homes he'd lived in from nylon fabric. His boyhood home in Seoul, the apartment in NYC, his house in London, and his home in Berlin. The transparent pastel fabric features all of the different details of your house that you don't even notice like the light switch plate and the door hinges. The spaced created the interior and the negative space that the inside of the walls would have. It was most interesting to see the people going through the spaces because you can see through the walls. It was fun to stand back and watch what people could discover in these ultra detailed fabric rooms.

We then went upstairs and were greeted by a video installation projected off a fabric gate form. It was amazing. It reminded me of a piece mindy and I had seen in NYC of the ancient scrolls that had been animated over the top of. The video captured day into night in the same way that the piece we saw in NYC did. Simply amazing. Outside the video was a miniature version of his home in Berlin that had his home from Korea crashing landing into the side of it with the nylon fabric parachute deflated on the floor. The amazing part was that the each of the apartments was complete with every aspect of one's living space right down to the dust on the floor and the scratches on the table legs. Everyone was different and the destruction where the Korean home had crash landed was not contrived looking. It was incredible in the amount of different things from the orange juice in the refrigerators to the toilet paper in the spools. I love miniatures, but this was done in such mass that it was almost too much to try to take in.

I'm so glad that we got to see this show as it comes down next week. It was an amazing experience to get to see this work and his attention to detail was inspiring, as I find that is something I often disregard for a looser expression. I hope when I get home that all of this will still be fresh in my mind and will find its way into influencing some future work.