A man runs along the bottom of a drawing, trailing hundreds of rainbow-coloured threads behind him. Somehow they are embedded in the paper. All connect upwards to a small wooden house with a pagoda roof that drifts in the air like a parachute behind him. Is it slowing him down, perhaps breaking a harsh landing, or might it raise him back up?
The theme of this extraordinarily beautiful exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh is perfectly simple yet unendingly complex – the enigma of home. Is it a place, or a feeling, a building or a city, a temporary apartment or a vision in the head?
This has been the steady preoccupation of the great Korean artist Do Ho Suh for almost 30 years. Born in Seoul in 1962, to a family who lived in the very house you see in that first work, Suh studied traditional Korean art for a decade before migrating to the US. Everything he makes is delicate yet tensile, light but profound, and always underpinned by his graceful draughtsmanship.
And everything runs back and forth in time – from where he once lived to wherever he resides now. A continuous undulating line, in one work, is in fact minutely inflected like a pictorial graph to describe everywhere he has ever lived in the world – a story without end.
The Korean house reappears all the time. It is a balloon, lifting him up to the clouds. It is a dream in the wind, or a harness attaching him back to the past. The rainbow threads, laid into the soft cotton paper when wet, stream from him or tangle him up in their glorious colours, embodiment of the very idea itself.
My Homes, from 2010, anthologises all sorts of concepts: the house that runs through his torso like an extra organ, the house that radiates out of his head, or lies balanced on his shoulders, that has legs – the artist’s own – upon which it walks. There are even rubbings, in coloured pencil on mulberry paper, of the interior of his family’s traditional hanok house, with its wooden fittings and its panelled doors: a lifesize home remembered, and bodied forth, on and in fragile paper.
“Home started to exist for me,” Suh has said, “when I no longer had it.” The artist landed first in Providence, Rhode Island, where he had to start all over again as a student, in 1991. He gives shape and form to this yearning for home. There are his home rubbings, as it were, and many exquisite recreations in paper of his family’s clothes, somewhere between chrysalis and shroud, in illuminated cases.
In 2012, he installed a clapboard house on the top of the engineering building at the University of California San Diego. It balances at a frighteningly precipitous angle, as seen in an enthralling film in Edinburgh, as if alighting like a bird from on high. Our sense of home might fly away at any moment; we are all, effectively, displaced.
But the works for which Suh first found fame relate to the brownstone building in Manhattan, where he lodged for several years. There is a marvellous image of its facade in this show: precise as a blueprint, and indeed stitched in translucent blue fabric on the page. Behind it (and visible through it) lies a great tangle of coloured silk threads, which at one point hold the vestige of a figure – the shadows of everything that happened (and perhaps was felt) there.
Suh is staggeringly various in his dreams and visions – this show stretches through many galleries without once flagging in its unceasing invention – but also in his evolving media. He works in charcoal, unleashing images of burning buildings, seen through haze or smoke. He works in watercolour to catch memories by the tail. There are full-scale 1:1 replicas of fittings in his West 22nd Street flat sculpted in silk, nylon and even transparent gelatin – a diaphanous basin, a ghostly light switch, backlit with LED so that they glimmer like the platonic ideals of these ordinary yet vital objects.
And right at the centre of Tracing Time, which fills the whole of the enormous ground floor at Modern One, is a lifesize installation of homes within homes within homes. All is created in transparent coloured fabric that defines the halls, corridors and doors of Suh’s successive apartments, including his present home in London, making them effectively material in every sense, yet as weightless as air. Visitors are encouraged to walk through an installation that is architecturally particular and yet almost invisible: to pass through a floating memory.
Suh has said that he wants “to carry my house, my home, with me all the time, like a snail”. Even though we may find the universal everywhere in his art (who hasn’t had dreams that take place in their childhood home?), it is also a memoir by other means. What is the ideal home for him? In one work, it is a hanok house sitting midway across a bridge between Korea and the US: an impossibility hanging above an engulfing ocean.
A self-portrait in this show presents Suh alone, silk threads rushing up from his head; and then again with his landlord, Arthur, whose threads are poignantly tangled in late dementia. Another shows him like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, multiple Suhs radiating round and round in a circle until they meet themselves face to face.
There is no single self in this work, no fixed home in this terrific show. Suh’s art is as original as his ideas are ultimately spiritual. Everything is circular, for him. Like the running man at the start, people are simply passing through place and time – through these worlds, these houses, these homes: all of us being without beginning or end.
• Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh, until 1 September
