This was a highly publicised, highly instagrammed exhibition. You can bet that everyone there knew what they were coming to see. However Passage presented so much more than the main event. Through a variety of mediums, each room focuses on a different element of ‘home’ and memory.
Aptly, the first room consists of large-scale front doors, flattened impressions of his famous architectural textiles, onto a gelatine tissue canvas - his newest process. The nature of the material changes in this process and leaves a more hallucinatory, wobbly drawing - more reminiscent of a fleeting memory. As you head upstairs to what you think will be the large ‘hub’ installation, you find yourself in a small room of light boxes displaying household fixtures in white fabric. Like an X-Ray examining the physical identity of doorknobs, lightbulbs and sockets. I appreciated this small space as a slow introduction to what we were about to experience. You begin to understand how the artist has been working with his environment and his emotional response.
Finally you are directed outside and round to the room housing the installation that everyone was there to see. I wonder whether this decision to disconnect the exhibition was deliberate to create some kind of a journey so that your memory of the exhibition is distinguished as 2 destinations with a passage between.
Suh creates 3D drawings in delicate translucent fabric, replicating to-scale the places he has lived around the world. What takes the work to a higher level is the specificity of using rooms that represent the ‘inbetween’, making up an endless corridor of corridors. Walking alongside the work you can watch the transitions in architectural styles as he makes his way around the world. When you walk underneath and through the work however, its a completely sensual immersion. Between the mesh fabric and the bright block colours of each section, you feel the walls pulsate and find yourself floating through trying to take in a 360 view of it at all times which is of course impossible.
Its important to remember that Suh’s work is not only depicting architecture, but architecture of the places in which we live, the places we call home. I began to dream up stories of the happenings inside those walls, and I couldn't help but think of the places that visually have stayed with me. Places that you passed through day in day out, walls that watched all the banalities of everyday life.
We can all understand the desire to cling onto small details of a memory we so wish to hold tangibly forever. This what Suh is doing when he captures a ghostly impression of the spaces which held those memories. This exhibition comes at a time where the upheaval of families and living in a permanent state of transit is very much topical and at the front of everyones social conscience. Temporary places that have to be called home - for an uncertain amount of time. Passage, while yes, is very aesthetically pleasing, and lucrative if you care about instagram likes, takes you on a much deeper and more profound emotional journey than expected, and is a brilliant showcase of meticulous craftsmanship capturing elaborate architectural detail. I look forward to the future evolution of Do Ho Suh’s work.
