Homebody
Do Ho Suh at the Tate and a comic about loss, shelter, and a homecoming.
This week’s comic is called: Homebody. It’s about 20 homes and the search for one inside myself. The comic continues from where we left off last week, thinking about what constitutes home/familiarity and what alienation feels like. Think of it like a companion to last week’s comic, but not a sequel. You can scroll down to the end if you’d like to skip straight to the storytelling, or read on for some thoughts on Do Ho Suh, the South Korean artist whose work I went to see a few weeks ago.
In Walk the House, Do Ho Suh recreates the homes he lived in since he was a child, in Seoul, London, New York, Berlin. He takes these homes apart and rebuilds them, turning them into monuments of fabric, plaster, appliances and memories. Do Ho Suh is haunted by these homes, he carries them in himself wherever he goes, and the exhibition is an expression of that: what of ourselves do we leave in the spaces we inhabit? What of those spaces do we carry with us wherever we go?
Walk the House, Do Ho Suh at the Tate Modern I am afraid of painting large canvases. I have a hard time thinking of things at that scale, and I’m trying to overcome this fear by painting a wall in my garden this week. A low pressure exhibition for the birds and the bees. I often think about how so much of the art exhibited in galleries relies on scale. To me, large canvases and installations are an artist saying: my ideas and my work are worthy of taking up space. I can fill your vast, cold, empty rooms with things that came out of my subconscious brain. A lot of Do Ho Suh’s work is like this: incredible because of the scale/detail of the execution. The homes made of fabric are recreated at scale, visitors can walk through the building, marvel at every embroidered detail from fire extinguishers to air conditioning units rendered in cloth.
Details of Do Ho Suh’s fabric homes. It’s always the notebooks, the sketchbooks, the drafts and the smaller works that blow my mind. These were a few of my favourite works by Do Ho Suh, along with two dresses that the artist and his wife made for their daughter, a gauzy white frock with dozens of pockets for her to carry all of her favourite childhood treasures.
Love discussing art with you <3 Let’s get to the comic now!
Wherever you are, I hope you are at home.
More soon,
Nish.
Your illustrations are nicely varied.