Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art

Epilogue: Almost Home

| 165 ALMOST HOME That we move through an ever-expanding world cannot be avoided, as we travel by choice either physically or virtually, as we are pushed by environmental catastrophe, or as we are urged under political pressure . Yet that we still care about specific spatial situations, that we need to be materially housed, and that we want to belong cannot be ignored. By finding a place for these desires, artists and architects can continue to reimagine and then materially replace the specific interdependencies between a body and a built site, and between the bodies held and housed there. And in disclosing these findings with others, each of us can continue to engage in the ongoing replacement of home, however accidentally, contingently, or momentarily. This book has charted a pathway that begins by acknowledging idealized narratives of individually situated dwelling and that moves toward a program for socially engaged spatial situation, in which temporary , visible, cohesive, and public moments of being in place are continuously redetermined. By considering a return to the hut, the reuse and reowning of spatial sites, the reintegration of structures within existing spatial frameworks and social systems, and finally by making Epilogue 166 | Epilogue publically visible the displacement of certain social bodies and the networks of dependency required to resituate us all over time, I have contemplated the viability of home, as both a material structure and an experience of belonging . Throughout such a trajectory, I have proposed a system of replacing that reinstates embodied interactions in specific sites by way of constantly renewable structural analogies, substitutions, and surrogacies. In the end, against a backdrop of unrelenting flows, forces, and upheavals, perhaps the best I can say is that replacing home is founded on a recognition of the ways each of us already makes do with our given spatial and social environments and is enacted when we figure out how to sustain and expand those particular materials and methods over time. I want to end with an example that speaks to the rationale and faith embedded in such a claim. On one of his first nights spent in New York while trying to fall asleep in his new apartment, the artist Do Ho Suh found himself longing for the familiar surroundings and settings he had left in Seoul. Then he remembered the Korean expression “You walk the house.” Denoting the commonplace portability of traditional domestic Korean architecture, this phrase marks both the material foundation and inspiration of Suh’s 1999 installation, Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home. The work is a life-size, precisely measured, transportable fabric replica of his family home, easy to pack up and carry, whose ever-expanding title incorporates each new site of its temporary situation and exhibition (Figure E.1). Traveling back to Korea to visit his parents, Suh began by making detailed notes of both the exterior design and interior spaces of their home, taking care to pause over the little marks and indentations he had made along the walls and floor as a child. While his family home is made up of five contemporary and traditional Korean structures, Suh focused on the section that his father had built out of red-pine timbers collected over the years from a dismantled nineteenth-century building formerly located on the grounds of King Sunjo’s palace. Itself already a replica, the Suh’s version took its inspiration from the domestic structure that the Yi dynasty king had built in 1828 so that he could experience the ordinary living spaces of his civilian subjects. Epilogue | 167 Walking his family’s dismantled, reconstructed, and reimagined home toward yet another site, Do Ho Suh returned to New York with his detailed measurements and childhood memories, and a newly honed skill for traditional Korean dressmaking. Aided by his mother, who helped him find master patternmakers and seamstresses, Suh had learned to sew and create shapes, lines, and volumes with fabric. Back in his studio, Suh crafted his handmade FIGURE E.1. Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/ Seattle Home/L.A. Home, 1999. Silk; 149 x 240 x 240 inches (378.5 x 609.6 x 609.6 cm). Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by an anonymous donor and a gift of the artist. Courtesy of...