Latest news with #BridgeProject
Time Out
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Reflecting on themes of memory, migration and the home, South Korean conceptual artist Do Ho Suh is internationally renowned for his vast fabric sculptures and meticulous architectural installations. This year, he's finally presenting a major exhibition at Tate Modern, in the city he currently lives, showcasing three decades of his work including brand-new, site-specific pieces. The exhibition begins with Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), a full-scale rendering of Suh's childhood hanok house in Korea, made of delicate off-white paper. Created through traditional rubbing techniques, the imprint of every surface, from the walls, floors, and fixtures, is captured in the material. This isn't simply a house – it's a lived experience, transposed onto graphite and fibre. The structure feels both solid and spectral, as if memory itself had drifted into the gallery and taken form. As the exhibition progresses, Suh leans further into his exploration of the spaces we carry within us. In Nest/s (2025), visitors walk through a corridor of interconnected translucent 'rooms' in vivid colours, where every detail, from light switches to radiators, is precisely rendered. Suh allows the viewer to activate the work through their movement, transforming it into a shifting, porous membrane. This structure leads to Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a life-size outline of Suh's current home in the UK, filled with domestic fixtures from the many places he has lived. Colour-coded and installed at their original heights, these familiar objects form a layered, disorienting map of Suh's past, becoming a quiet, spatial autobiography. Suh suggests that the idea of a perfect home is an illusion Suh is fascinated by graphs, mapping, ordering and measuring to distill ideas. His Bridge Project takes the themes present in the interior installations and magnifies them onto a global scale. The work imagines a bridge, connecting the cities he's lived in (Seoul, New York and London) and points to its midpoint in the Arctic Ocean: a place that is claimed by no one yet threatened by all, somewhere charged with climate anxiety, colonial histories and statelessness. In this speculative space, Suh suggests that the idea of a perfect home is itself an illusion. The void becomes a space of resistance, against fixed borders, national identities and the politics of belonging. Each element of the exhibition, from the drawings to the installations and films, is individually compelling. But the space itself feels compressed; the works are densely arranged and you can't help but feel that each piece would benefit from more room to breathe. As it stands, the intimacy of Suh's practice risks being overwhelmed by the tightness of the display. That said, his message is clear. In an age defined by global migration and shifting borders, the home is a charged space: at once personal and political, defining a threshold between private and public, past and present. His intricately rendered fabric and paper reconstructions of the houses he's inhabited go beyond architectural replication: they chart emotion, displacement and adaptation, and they do so beautifully.
Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Do Ho Suh review — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home
An enticing light switch. A pleasing plug socket. A door handle deserving of a turn. Do Ho Suh's fixtures and appliances are meticulously detailed and beautifully vibrant, the domestic (and, dare I say, more dazzling) version of Damien Hirst's dots and pills. At Tate Modern, the great Korean artist has fashioned hundreds from colour-coded fabric according to the places he's inhabited, and installed them on four transparent panels modelled on his present London abode. The effect is at once playful and haunting, a ghostly meeting of places and time zones that poses questions about the meaning of home. Which is what — a place, a feeling, an idea? Such questions echo around this exquisite exhibition, which surveys Suh's rich and varied practice over the past 30 years. Born in Seoul in 1962, he studied art for a decade before moving to the US in 1991, continuing his studies and eventually relocating to London in 2010. The show borrows its name from an old expression he heard the carpenters constructing his childhood home use when he was a boy. The building was a traditional Korean timber house with a tiled roof known as a hanok, which could be taken to pieces and put back together again in a new spot — a process of 'walking the house'. Suh has walked it right into the gallery space — or at least a life-sized version of it, made from mulberry paper, which he previously wrapped around the house and rubbed over with graphite to capture the sometimes smooth, sometimes nubby textures of stone, glass, wood. It reappears in delicate threaded drawings that unspool in rainbow colours across vast sheets of cotton paper: hovering in mid-air, tethered like a parachute to a person running; sprouting a pair of legs and hurrying along independently. For the most part, it's a one-room show, with an elegant mix of works on paper, videos and large-scale installations that are as bright and cheery as they are profound. At one end, a lengthy film projected onto a big screen explores the impact of gentrification on the residents of a housing estate destined for demolition in east London. At the centre, a shimmering polychrome passageway configured from different rooms the artist has spent time in calls out for children to charge through it like a playground. Is there such a thing as the perfect home? Bridge Project, which Suh began in 1999, an epilogue of sorts, imagines a hanok perched in the middle of a bridge connecting the three cities in his life, suspended tantalisingly above the ocean. A floating home. ★★★★☆ The exhibition runs May 1 to Oct 19,
CBS News
14-02-2025
- General
- CBS News
Arlington High School senior creates volunteer tutoring club for younger English learners
Arlington High School senior Karen Yoda knows how it feels to move to a community where you don't speak the language and don't know anyone. She was going into third grade when her family moved from Japan to Arlington. "A lot of people already had friends. I remember being very lonely," she recalls. She also remembers how much she looked forward to her MLL (multilingual learner) classes. "They were the classes where I didn't just have to sit there and be confused," she said. "They were classes where all the teacher's attention was on me. I could go at my own pace and try new things." Inspired by her own tutor Karen, who is about to turn 18, also remembers the positive influence of her tutor. Miu Kikuchi was a high school student. Her help and attention inspired Karen. "She was an older student who was once in my shoes who was now fluent in English and someone who I really, really looked up to," she said. Their work together helped Karen learn English and, eventually, graduate out of the MLL program. When COVID hit, the memory of her personal experience gave Karen an idea that would eventually become the Bridge Project. In 2020, with time on her hands and a desire to be helpful, Karen began tutoring two younger students who had recently moved, as she had, from Japan to Arlington. She was in eighth grade and tutoring the siblings over Zoom. Later, when school resumed and in-person sessions were allowed, she also tutored a boy in Hannah Dingman's class. Hannah, who is now Director of Multilingual Learner Education for Winchester Public Schools, knew that the boy would benefit from Karen's help. "He needed a little bit more support with somebody who could translate things," she said. She explains that students whose parents don't speak English often struggle with understanding culture and expectations. With Karen's help, Hannah saw the boy blossom. "She knew exactly what he was going through because she went to the same elementary school. She understood the work," she said. Hannah, who was teaching at Hardy Elementary School at the time, remembers it as a very positive pairing. "It's almost like a light went off. I can remember thinking back and-all of a sudden-his time at school started to look different," she said. "All of a sudden, he's asking more questions and he's feeling more confident about his abilities and just producing more work." Eventually, Hannah helped Karen make a plan for a tutoring club that would match younger English-learning students with high schoolers who speak, when possible, the same "home language." The Bridge Project In the fall of 2023, Karen officially launched the Bridge Project. High school tutors spend an hour a week with their tutees-often at Robbins Library-working on reading, writing, and conversation. "I love tutoring kids," Karen said smiling. Initially, getting the word out was challenging. With dozens of tutors ready to go, many of the parents whose children might benefit couldn't read the e-mail communications from the club. The language barrier was too much. But shortly after Karen and another member of the Bridge Project made an in-person presentation to parents, their e-mail boxes filled up with requests. They knew they were onto something special. There are now roughly 50 tutoring pairs. Fifty more high school students have interviewed for the volunteer work and are ready to begin tutoring. Another 100 students have expressed an interest in tutoring in the future. The club's faculty advisor Duncan Slobodzian, who's also an MLL teacher, says the Bridge Project's growth is a testament to the time, effort, and resource development that Karen and the rest of the club's leadership team have invested. "To me, that stands as one of the legacies of the work that Karen and the rest of them have done in this club," he explains. Duncan (known to students as "Mr. S.") explains that he is passionate about English language arts and literature. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Java, Indonesia, he remembers trying to figure out how to communicate and learn the culture. When Karen asked him to serve as the club's advisor, he responded with a quick, enthusiastic yes. Creation of community He says the positive feedback the group's received from parents confirms that peer-to-peer tutoring leads to better academic performance, more confidence, and the creation of community. He says right now, when many immigrant families feel frightened and insecure, creating a "safe space" is a welcome support. At an after-school meeting, Karen and the Bridge Project's leadership team discuss how to talk about sensitive topics. They agree that offering information on the club's website about citizens' rights aligns with their mission. For Karen, the Bridge Club's evolution may be as gratifying as its creation. "I love running this club," she explains. She says that working with members to improve the club's offerings, expand its resources, and serve more elementary and middle school students is endlessly fulfilling. As they find new ways to support more people in Arlington, members also hope that other school districts will follow their lead. "I would really, really encourage someone to start something like this in their own district," Karen said. "I think it has helped a lot of different people. It's also really fun!"
