Asian American art helps build our awareness of our cultural history.
By Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt
A
full-sized ghost of a house with a swooping roof hovers above us: constructed from translucent celadon green fabric, its sways and flutters in the large gallery space. Each of the four walls is covered with what looks like elaborately paneled windows and sliding doors. But, the intricate lattice work that we expect to be wood is, instead, carefully pieced and stitched silk. Rafters and the central beam that should support the house are dematerialized; light glows through the seemingly weightless channels of pale fabric. Standing below Do Ho Suh’s Seoul Home/L.A. Home… (1999), craning my neck upwards, I feel a tug in my stomach. The structure itself is unfamiliar, but through material, scale, and positioning, Suh evokes the sense of longing for the place-we-cannot-be. Indeed, much of Suh’s work as an artist explores this yearning.
Seoul Home was Suh’s first collapsible fabric structure. It is a full-scale replica of his parents’ home in Seoul, South Korea. That home, in turn, was modeled after a nineteenth century Confucian scholar’s house. After moving to New York City following art school, Suh found himself longing for the quiet and restfulness of his parent’s home. How could he bring that house to his New York apartment? Eventually, working with his mother and Korean seamstresses, Suh designed and fabricated a house that could be literally packed into a suitcase and transported anywhere.
In another installation, Perfect Home II (2003), gauzy pale pink and baby blue fabric recreate Suh’s New York apartment. The life-sized rooms barely brush the ground, and each is rendered with eerie specificity. We pause to marvel at every meticulously crafted door handle, radiator, and light switch. But the sink and toilet are rumpled and the bookshelves sag. We might hold our breath, as if convinced that a too-strong exhale might cause the delicate forms to dissipate altogether.
The apartment exists in a strange no-man’s land. It never fully crystallizes, but it also never disappears. We can step into the space, but we can never truly inhabit it. We cannot cook on the perfectly articulated fabric stove or place solid objects onto the seamed bookshelves. Our bodies are too heavy for this space. We can visit, but we cannot settle in. Indeed, this sense of dislocation is crucial to Suh’s work. “At some point in your life,” he says, “you have to leave your home. When you go back, it is not the same home anymore.” Though mobile, these fabric spaces are always ghosts. We can fold them and take them with us, and yet they perpetually remain out of our grasp.
It is strange how easy it is to begin talking about Suh’s Seoul Home and Perfect Home II as if they are our own homes. Despite their minute details and particularity, Suh’s houses open themselves up to our own memories of past spaces. None of my homes have looked like Suh’s, and yet his sculptures elicit deep longing for my parent’s single-wall construction home in Honolulu and the brick foursquare home my husband and I renovated in St. Louis. We ache for familiar spaces not simply due to rosy nostalgia, but because of a profoundly human desire to be in a place where we are known and understood.
This longing certainly resonates in Asian American communities. Many Asian Americans have experienced the stereotype of the perpetual foreigner. Barred from becoming naturalized citizens until the Immigration Act of 1952, Asian immigrants have long been perceived as unable to assimilate to white American culture. To this day, Asian Americans are often asked questions like “But where are you really from?” regardless of citizenship status or how long they have been in the States. At their best, our homes — with their particular foods and smells and idioms and decor and traditions — serve as spaces of respite and belonging where we do not have to explain ourselves or justify our existence.
But as Asian American Christians, the yearning that Suh’s ephemeral houses enact also points us to our greater dislocation. Perhaps our cultural histories and experiences can help us to understand more fully the author of Hebrews’ assertion that we are all strangers and exiles in this world. The ache we feel for the elusive homes of our past pale in comparison to the full and complete security we will find in “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10).
Photos courtesy of Erin Williamson under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Elissa is currently Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections of race, gender, and representation, and explore the potential of art to model and encourage empathy. Website: http://elissa.weichbrodt.org | Instagram: @elissabrodt | Twitter: @elissabrodt