Ning-Hui Chung

Do Ho Suh (born 1962, Seoul) is a contemporary artist whose practice centers on the concepts of home, identity, and migration. He reconstructs his lived spaces in translucent fabric, translating architecture into memory. Through delicate, portable structures, Suh transforms the notion of “home” into an emotional landscape shaped by movement, belonging, and time.

Jet Lag (2022) is a large-scale installation composed of over 400 translucent polyester and stainless-steel replicas of everyday objects—such as doorknobs, light switches, and cupboard handles—collected from Suh’s various homes across Seoul, New York, and London. Arranged like a musical score on the wall, these vivid “memory specimens” collapse geography and chronology into one continuous experience. Through the metaphor of jet lag, the work explores spatial disorientation, emotional continuity, and the accumulation of lived memory carried within the idea of “home.”

In Jet Lag, Do Ho Suh constructs a “portable architecture of memory” through his material framework of translucent polyester fabric and stainless steel. Industrial materials are reimagined as emotional vessels, where household objects become fragments of experience stitched into a non-linear visual score. The installation embodies the tension between lightness and permanence, visibility and absence—transforming domestic familiarity into a suspended, meditative state of being.

Methodologically, Suh works through reconstruction and archiving, translating everyday objects into transparent specimens that chart a psycho-geography of belonging. His approach resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, where the home is a container of memory, and aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “smooth space,” where identity and memory flow beyond geography. The viewer, encountering these delicate forms, experiences both intimacy and estrangement—an echo of diasporic consciousness.

For my own sculptural practice, Jet Lag prompts me to rethink how material transparency and fragility can hold emotional density. I explore ways to translate “psychological space” into tactile form, using material contrast and spatial rhythm as emotional language. Like Suh, I aim to create works that bridge structure and memory—objects that are not merely seen, but felt, carrying the invisible traces of time and presence within their form.

#Home And Displacement #Memory And Space #Translucent Material #Poetics Of Space #Identity And Belonging #Objects And Memory

Image credits and website:

https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/do-ho-suh

Written on: 3 August 2025