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.

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Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

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