February 13, 2015
235 W 23rd St (between 7th and 8th avenues)
New York, 646 862 0833

What does it mean to be woman? Is the divine purpose of our lives tied to marriage and everything that accompanies? Will our “mission be complete” once a man chooses us as his bride?

Is marriage all there is?

Over the course of nine years, performance artist Maria Yoon explored ideas and a range of attitudes toward marriage. Her journey to knowing and unknowing is recorded in Maria the Korean Bride (2013), a 75-minute documentary-style film Yoon directs and stars in. The film, which screened in collaboration with Baang + Burne Contemporary for Valentines Day, features Yoon as Maria the Korean Bride (MtKB) traveling across the country on two-day trips to marry someone — and sometimes something — in each of the 50 states, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. After 50 marriages and thousands of miles zig-zagging across the United States, Yoon didn’t find any definitive answers to these questions about women and marriage, but her quest did lead to provocative questioning and unexpected answers.

Yoon is a first-generation Korean-American and the eldest daughter, born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in New York City. Although much of Yoon’s childhood was spent like a typical American youth, her parents made it clear that they expected their daughters to marry a Korean man, but even more importantly, marry to prove themselves good daughters and honorable women. The film shows how Yoon seems to disappoint time and again — her youngest sister was wed before Yoon began the project, and her father frequently refuses to discuss how he feels about marriage, his daughter’s project, or even to be filmed. Without a serious romantic relationship happening in her life, let alone marriage prospects, Yoon felt increasingly burdened with unfulfilled responsibility and obligation. To highlight the gravity of these expectations, Yoon’s mother gave her a wedding Hanbok, a traditional formal Korean skirt and shirt outfit worn for special occasions, for her 30th birthday. Receiving her wedding Hanbok started Yoon on a journey to explore the differing meanings of marriage around the country; Maria the Korean Bride was born.

Getting married became a well-run production: finding volunteers to assist (coordinating with photographers, finding “husbands ” on Craigslist or through friends and other connections), locating ministers to perform the ceremony, creating vows and rituals specific to the location and situation, getting waivers and paperwork to ensure that the marriages weren’t legally binding. Finally, MtKB’s first wedding to a Diana Ross impersonator took place in Las Vegas in 2002.

Yoon married men, women, a racehorse, an oil pump, a public park, statues and more during her nine-year performance as MtKB. She began to marry inanimate objects after an especially trying trip to the Milwaukee Brewing Company in Wisconsin. A weekend tour manager asked Yoon to “leave” and told her “go back to where you came from” after seeing her wearing the traditional Korean dress. Yoon admits to feeling confused and hurt by the assumptions the tour manager made about her, but determined to have a ceremony in Milwaukee anyway. The incident prompted her to buy a shirt from the gift shop and marry it in lieu of an actual man, freeing up her thinking around what it means to be in union with another.

As Yoon traveled, she spoke to people along the way, asking them to tell her about their own marriage or their choices not to marry. Interviews in the film include a polygamist household that spoke on the benefit of having someone else there to balance things out, while also admitting that this kind of arrangement certainly would not work for everyone. Gay and lesbian couples discussed their appreciation of matrimony because it gives their families and spouses practical legal protections, but questioned the reasoning of tying marriage to the administration of things like healthcare, death benefits and social security to the institution. A minister who performed one of Yoon’s ceremonies admitted to questioning her own marriage as she began to prepare vows for MtKB. This soul searching and consideration of marriage’s meaning led her realize that she should probably get a divorce. Yoon’s mother is featured frequently, with the artist calling her “the glue” for the film. Her mother states that she was proud of her daughter for making a film that made her and others think about what it means to marry.

MtKB’s final wedding took place in Times Square in May 2011. To mark the occasion, Yoon organized a raffle drawing to choose her final husband. She had a cake made, and engaged Jimmy McMillian, leader of The Rent is Too Damn High political party, to officiate. During the Q&A after the screening, Yoon said she was happy when the project ended and grateful that she only had to do it 50 times. She didn’t come away from the project with any greater perspective on actually being married; she realized that one could only know its value once one has actually experienced it.

For Yoon, MtKB began as an act of defiance, an action to prove her worthiness and ability to find a husband — or 50 — whenever she wanted. Rather than a simple voyage of personal discovery, Maria the Korean Bride grew into a journey of understanding that led Yoon to a greater appreciation for the lives and hearts of a range of people also seeking to understand for themselves love, partnership, and union outside of traditional notions of marriage for themselves.

The post Always the Bride: Maria Yoon’s Marriage Experiment appeared first on artcritical.

To refer to Do Ho Suh’s works on paper as “drawings” is not quite right. Yes, paper and sometimes pencil are involved, but in his employ these materials alchemically morph into sculpture, while the tools of sculpture — blueprints and string — flatten into two dimensions. This refusal to conform to the dictates of medium and space is gentle — a question rather than an edict. The artist’s thoughtful investigations into personal, communal and historical conceptions of home and memory have always been similarly untethered by gravity and undaunted by scale.

The artist’s oeuvre is gathered for the first time into an English-language monograph, with essays by Clara Kim, Elizabeth A.T. Smith, and Rochelle Steiner, and published in conjunction with dual exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin’s 26^th street and Chrystie street locations. The catalogue and shows are focused around Suh’s drawing: renderings and sketches of projects, poignantly wavery thread on paper, and the labor-intensive “Rubbing/Loving” series.

Throughout his work, Suh has recreated the physical environs of the various homes he’s lived in, reinterpreting the house he grew up in (a traditional Korean hanok); his first apartment in the US, in Providence, Rhode Island; and many more after that. They are reincarnated in translucent organdy-like fabric, suspended from the ceiling or as a tiny cottage crashing into the space between industrial buildings in Liverpool or a rooftop at UC San Diego. Sometimes, as in the series of colored-pencil-on-paper “Self-Portraits,” on view in the Chrystie Street gallery, the homes literally emerge from the head or the heart of the artist, bifurcating the chest cavity or sprouting from the frontal lobe — the meaning of place exemplified as biological organic extension of self.

Suh’s telling of his story of immigration and transience — of leaving home and finding a new or many new ones — invokes universal human histories. We all have left home to make our way, only to carry vestiges with us by design or by accident. This conjuring of collective experience is never more literal than in the “Rubbing/Loving” project, where the artist covers interior and exterior walls of homes with vellum and painstakingly rubs graphite or colored pencil over the surfaces, creating textured tracings of the walls, floors, tiles, light switches, radiators, toilet seats and all. In videos displayed at both galleries, we see the artist and his assistants at work, sometimes blindfolded, crouched in bathtubs, and perched on ladders, shoulder to shoulder, or alone in the rain, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing silently with dirty hands in an unsettlingly compulsive ritual. These projects began with the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, where Suh exhibited three rubbings from housing in the old part of the city as a reference to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, news of which was censored by the government. The blindfold is not a punishment but rather an exercise in disciplined sensory integration — if we can’t see then we can feel and hear and discern together.

At the Chrystie street gallery we see the fruits of these efforts reconfigured in wooden structures: small, freestanding rooms lined with the rubbings made on the other side of the world. The rhythmic scraping sounds of their making are piped in — strange white noise not immediately connectable to the structures themselves. The effect is disconcerting though not altogether unpleasant, allowing the viewer a sense of participation in the making of the work — one can imagine even farther back to a life in the tiny room, living, working, looking out the opaque window through the gallery wall to the city of Gwangju.

In the 26^th street gallery is a ghostly recreation of the artist’s former apartment at 348 West 22^nd street, the open wall facing the street, and blueprint-like rubbings of walls and floor, covering the walls and floor. The apartment space is smaller than the gallery, but mapped out it expands to fill the room, inviting many more visitors than would comfortably fit in the small studio apartment. Apparently the artist took advantage of a gap between tenants to return to his old home with his team of assistants, capturing every mundane detail so that gallery goers might see what he saw every day, to share his space with him for a little while.

Suh’s themes of togetherness and shared past, present, and future recur movingly in his thread and watercolor drawings. Figures sprout other figures from their bodies, continuously mirroring or trailing as colorful ghost shadows. The lines swirl and waver from one body to another and beyond, as though eddying in currents or blown by the wind — hinting at a force beyond the picture, beyond the dimension, beyond our, or these, selves. Many of the works on paper have the word “Karma” in the title, though as expertly explained by Rochelle Steiner in her catalogue essay, “Do Ho Suh’s Karmic Journey,” it is karma not only in the colloquial shorthand definition of cosmic justice but also in a greater sense of the interconnectedness of all times and all people.

The “Drawings” book adeptly traces Suh’s exploration of these connections — person and place, group and individual, inside and outside. We see the evolution of the “Bridge Project,” a never-to-be-realized “perfect home,” situated equidistant from New York and Seoul on an impossible bridge that spans the continental U.S. and the Pacific Ocean, connecting both cities. In every depiction, smoke drifts upward from the tiny chimney. This is not just an unfeasible house — it is an unfeasible home. Another recurring ideal is the legged or many-legged peripatetic house, evoking an oft-quoted desire of the artist to carry his home with him like a snail, though, unlike a snail, in Suh’s depiction he has many helpers.

Suh’s work rewards mindfulness, inviting the viewer to contemplation. Standing in the Chrystie street show, my mind wanders to my own experience of space: of this gallery space and my memories here, and of other spaces in other times throughout my life where I similarly paused, knowing that seemingly fleeting moment would stay with me. We all carry our past places with us, perhaps just not as consciously as Suh.

The post Adventures Close to Home: Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin appeared first on artcritical.