Do Ho Suh Turns Household Appliances Into Ghostly Specimens

Artist Turns Household Appliances Into Ghostly Specimens

Have you ever dreamed about the unlikely lovechild of a jellyfish and your fridge?

Artist Do Ho Suh's upcoming exhibition transforms household appliances into polyester fabric forms, turning the clunky utilities into ghostly specimens. The sculptures will go on view in the aptly titled exhibition "Specimen Series," at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Hong Kong.

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Refrigerator, 2013 polyester fabric. Photo by Taegsu Jeon

The Korean-born, United States-based artist, consistently returns to themes of architecture, personal space and the home in relation to feelings of belonging, conformity and isolation. For this particular exhibition, Suh focuses on the mechanical objects we expect to encounter -- though don't necessarily see -- around the home, from a refrigerator to a toilet. He depicts these cumbrous commodities as glowing exoskeletons that look more like alien forms than working appliances.

Through his works, Suh envisions the home as a site for the uncanny to grow and play, mirroring the unsettling middle ground experienced at a home away from home. "It's more a willful rejection of the permanence of, say, marble, in favor of a rather more fantastical material," Core77 explains. "Equally suggestive of Platonic archetypes and ghosts of appliances past. Yet their gossamer materiality evokes an uncanny personal sentiment to the effect that these manifestations of his memories that makes them feel like our own."

We will never look at a stove without dreaming of its gossamer counterpart again.

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Toilet, 2013 polyester fabric
Photo by Taegsu Jeon

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Stove, 2013 polyester fabric
Photo by Taegsu Jeon

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Radiator, 2013 polyester fabric
Photo by Taegsu Jeon

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Medicine Cabinet, 2013 polyester fabric
Photo by Taegsu Jeon

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Bathtub, 2013 polyester fabric
Photo by Taegsu Jeon

Do Ho Suh's "Specimen Series" runs from November 14, 2013 until January 25, 2014 at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Hong Kong.

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