“Almost Home,” a new 3-D art installment by Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh, allows you to move through all the places he formally lived. You enter an apartment, put down your bag and your coat and move through the different rooms. There is a red staircase and you can see right through the walls. A doorknob pulses almost as if there was a breeze. Doors slightly sag and you can see people moving around the home. “Almost Home,” which you can view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is filled with fabric sculptures, moldings and fixtures of different rooms you would find in Berlin, New York and Seoul. Suh has recreated the halls he used to walk, and in doing so, redefines what home and hearth mean. Suh is an international nomad, currently based in London, but he keeps a small live and workspace in New York and goes to Korea several times a year, Smithsonian Magazine reports. He started documenting the spaces he lived as a grad student in New York and then worked backward for a while. His mom helped him recreate his boyhood home. During his student years, Suh moved about nine times, but this constant movement actually helped his work. He had to make his life “light” and easily packed. He says his art is “all about dealing with the sense of loss.” Smithsonian writes that his most skillful trick is to create the proper balance of presence and absence, to put the audience in the moment using objects that aren’t there.
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