Do-Ho Suh's flat comprises a corridor, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Some doors open on to emptiness and to spaces as yet undefined. The apartment is weightless and translucent, like the house of an invisible man - or a reader of Marx who woke one morning to discover that all that is solid had already begun to melt into air.
Perhaps this insubstantiality reflects the mind of a man who is as yet uncertain where he is, a life not so much in exile as in transit, between countries, cultures, languages. Sometimes the entire apartment is hidden in a gunny sack or neatly folded away in a suitcase, and packed off to another part of the world - Seoul, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Seattle. You are here. You are not here.
Here, for now, is London's Serpentine Gallery, where Korean-born Suh's first British show opens today. His Manhattan apartment, or rather a diaphanous, ghostly version formally known as 348 West 22nd St, Apt A, New York, NY 10011 USA, is the best work here.
Light flows through the walls and doors as well as the windows. You can walk the corridor and stand in the rooms. More than that, you can check out the heavy lock and the spyhole in the front door, the building's sprinkler system slung from the ceiling, the window frames, the panelling and fireplace and the old-fashioned radiators. The switches, sockets and shelves are here, the bath and the sink with its exposed plumbing, the shower head poking out from the bathroom tiles. The loo, the kitchen stove, the fridge and the concertina doors of the built-in wardrobe: it is all in place, but somehow all a little bit wonky and insubstantial, everything meticulously sewn from sheer curtains of nylon fabric.
The plumbing is sewn as though it were pockets and sleeves, the toilet like a bodice, its handle like the finger of a glove. The walls and doors are like the panels of a skirt - the apartment is a dress. Where Claes Oldenberg's soft sculptures of objects were clunky and rumbustious, Suh's apartment is delicate, impassive, entirely lacking in irony, except that to have expert Korean seamstresses replicate a rackety New York flat is already somehow absurd. Were it not so oddly poetic, it would be ridiculous.
A second dwelling, and an even more complex displacement, hangs like a levitating Wendy house in the Serpentine's central gallery. This is a fabric replica of a building that was itself a copy of an ordinary Korean house. The first replica dwelling was erected in the gardens of the emperor's palace in 1828, so that the emperor might experience for himself the living conditions of ordinary Koreans - much like Marie Antoinette's playtime milking parlour at Versailles. The edifice was demolished in the 1970s and Suh's father, an eminent painter, bought the lumber in order to construct a duplicate. Suh's fabric version is a further copy. Where the New York flat follows the contours of a typical 20th-century urban gaff, the Seoul Home is a refabrication of hand-sawn timber beams and joists, expert vernacular joinery. It floats, out of place and out of time, untouchable and somehow dematerialised.
So far, so good. These are undoubtedly the 40-year-old artist's most arresting works. They seem to belong alongside other examples of artworks that take real spaces as their starting point - Oldenberg's vinyl bedroom, Gregor Schneider's terrifying Dead House, Ed Keinholz's bars and brothels and fetid rooms, Rachel Whiteread's casts, Ilya Kabakov's Soviet interiors. Yet Suh's works do not belong, either in one place or another. The translucency and ephemerality of his chosen material speak of tradition or rootedness in a culture - think of rice and mulberry-paper sliding walls and screens, the fluidity and permeability of inside and outside in much eastern architecture. But they also imply a kind of displacement, or things recollected rather than present.
These are very rich works in all sorts of ways. Looking at the New York space, one is aware of the hand made aspect, of the care and delicacy of Suh's copy, in contradiction to the beat-up serviceability of the real Midtown eyrie. New York, it seems to me, is irrevocably masculine. Suh's model - a kind of antidote - asserts the feminine.
The rest of the show is much less rich. Several works have conformity as a subtext: a "welcome" mat, the word picked out in a few black figures among the rows and rows of otherwise identical, Jelly Baby-like amber figures; a raised glass floor you can walk on, the plate glass held up on the raised hands of yet more thousands of figures, each no more than a couple of inches high. Are they supporting you and your great big feet, or are you bearing down on them? This is an obvious ambiguity, even though it is quite nice to lie on the floor and look through the sides of the glass to get a proper view of the Lilliputian crowd. You feel like Gulliver, and you get your clothes dirty. All this stuff seems to do with the subsuming of the individual into the mass. If a western artist were to make works that portrayed Koreans - or Chinese or Japanese people for that matter - as militaristic communitarians, they would be lynched.
The huge, empty, spread-armed costume Some/One, which appears to be made of chain mail or metallic fish scales but turns out to be manufactured from thousands of fake dog tags, seems to labour a point about collectivity and militarism, just like the marshalled ranks of 60 identical jackets and collars that make up High School Uni-Form. You never need to look at these more than once. I much prefer a group of little drawings, more genial cartoons than anything, about the idea of home. One has a little house with a gently puffing chimney, walking on purposeful human legs away from Seoul towards LA. My Country has a big empty outline of a house with lots and lots of feet peeking out from under it, all walking in the same direction. We might read the drawings as a parable of the artist's progress from his homeland to America, a journey between cultures. The drawings wrap up Suh's preoccupations.
Serpentine Gallery exhibitions are invariably elegant, however variable the art. Elegance is nice, but elegance in art is everywhere these days. I'm sure that if the Serpentine decided chaos was the thing, it would arrange that elegantly too. There's as much stylistic conformity and mannerism in contemporary art - globally - as in any other aspect of modern life.
Differences and distinctions are much more interesting and vital. There's a paradox here, as an old New Yorker cartoon once had it: angry spouse shouts at artist hunched over expressionist canvas, "Why do you have to be nonconformist like everybody else?" The important thing for an artist, I believe, is to find a voice, as much as a subject, a material, or a style. The voice, if you like, is a place as much as it is a tone or a style. It is a place to come from, even if it is never really home. It is what you're stuck with, even if you don't belong. The conflicts in Do-Ho Suh's art, between rootedness and displacement, are as good a place to begin as anywhere. It's all in the apartment.
Lives and works between, New York City, Korea and Berlin
