Do Ho Suh at the Tate modern

Home within Home

This model merges Suh’s childhood hanock (Korean traditional house) from Seoul with a 19th century house in Providence in the USA. The wall notes describe the work ‘speculative’ in which his childhhood home has flown over the Atlantic and crashed into the Providence building and are working out how they relate to each other.

I hadn’t thought of the piece as speculative, being only familiar with the phrase in the context of ‘speculative fiction’ in reference to science fiction and William Gibson. Margaret Atwood defines speculative fiction as literature that deals with possibilities in a society which have not yet been enacted but are latent. But I think this piece alludes to a more sort of magical interplay in an urban environment between two culture’s architectures.

I was mostly taken by the polycarbonate twinwall sheet, which gave the piece a sort of translucent icey elegance. Can’t explain why but it reminded me of Mariele Neudecker, who I saw in a group show called Belladonna years ago, in 1997, at the ICA in London. I believe the piece she had in that group show was, The Sea of Ice 1996-7, a re- working of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of the same name. But I have always admired her turquoise tank installations with their ghostly ships and landscapes.

Thinking of the two and that mix of turquoise constructions and vitrines and also the industrial bold steel frames, also got me thinking of my favourite work by Jeff Koons, his Equilibrium basketball pieces, which is also have a sort of speculative urban play. Talking about the work in an Artforum interview…

‘KS: What was the reaction to your first solo show there, in 1985?

JK: I think people liked the vacuum cleaner pieces I had shown earlier, but they wanted to see more, to see that I had a little wider reach. And I think “Equilibrium” did that. It was quite a narrative show.

KS: What was the narrative?

JK: Well, it dealt with states of being that really don’t exist, like the fish tank with a ball hovering in equilibrium, half in and half out of the water. This ultimate or desired state is not sustainable: Eventually the ball will sink to the bottom of the tank. Then there were the Nike posters, which acted as sirens that could take you under. I looked at the athletes in those posters as representing the artists of the moment, and the idea that we were using art for social mobility the way other ethnic groups have used sports. We were middle-class white kids using art to move up into another social class.’

Like all three pieces there is also something really appealing about the skill and craft of the construction of the pieces. I have read a review of Koons pieces and the science behind getting the basket balls to float in the tanks is amazing. Apparently Koons consulted with physicist Dr. Richard P. Feynman, and created the suspended the basketballs by filling the tank with a solution of refined salt and distilled water. The basketballs are also filled with distilled water so they float in the liquid, rather than rise to the top. I believe over time eventually the balls will move out of place and eventually sink.

So like Do Ho Suh’s house there is a sort of transience, flux and mystery to all these pieces.