
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG/COMMISSIONED BY GWANGJU BIENNALE 2012
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG/COMMISSIONED BY GWANGJU BIENNALE 2012
Beyond the gallery’s entrance was the freestanding brick outer wall of his erstwhile abode; the apartment’s interior wall was tacked to the other side. Rubbings of the hallway surfaces, the bathroom and its fixtures, and the kitchen complete with cabinets filled the walls. The tactile blue rubbings, affixed with red map tacks, were quietly sensuous, as if Suh were caressing the familiar personal space. On the ground: a 1:1-scale rubbing of the apartment’s floors.
At the Christie Street space, a loveable pink rubbing of the apartment corridor’s deadbolts, pipes, and doorknobs led back to Suh’s Korean past with two freestanding room structures commissioned for the 2012 Gwangju Biennial: an abandoned dormitory room at Gwangju Catholic Lifelong Institute, and the abandoned Company Housing of Gwangju Theater. One was rubbed with multicolored pencils; the other (accompanied by the sounds of its own making), was made with grungy gray graphite while the artist was blindfolded. In these decrepit rooms, Suh’s sense of space becomes overtly political and historical: the blindfold refers to government censorship of the 1980 Gwangju uprising and student massacre. And the desire to forget that indelible event was why Gwangju was originally chosen as the site of a biennial.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 110.