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Do Ho Suh — Alarm Keypad, Unit G5, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7SB, UK
Do Ho Suh

Alarm Keypad, Unit G5, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7SB, UK

2017

A small alarm keypad rendered in the luminous blue-white tones of a cyanotype print, this work distills an entire psychology of home into one ordinary object. Do Ho Suh has long investigated the emotional weight carried by domestic architecture, and here that inquiry contracts to its most intimate scale, a numbered security panel photographed in the flat he occupied at Union Wharf in London. The full address inscribed in the title is no bureaucratic detail but a deliberate act of specificity, anchoring memory to a precise location and asserting that home is not an abstraction but a layered accumulation of lived experience within particular walls. The cyanotype process, with its blueprint-like washes of cyan and white, transforms a mundane fixture into something closer to a specimen preserved under glass, both familiar and eerily distant. Suh is best known for his large-scale fabric sculptures that reconstruct former residences in Seoul, Providence, Berlin, and New York at exact dimensions, architecture rendered soft and translucent in an attempt to carry place across displacement. This smaller work belongs to the same sustained meditation but arrives through a different material logic. The keypad, which once authenticated belonging and granted passage, now exists as a silhouetted record of habitation, a kind of evidence. Number 26 in a series of 30 unique photographs, it occupies a considered position within a finite body of work that collectively maps the spaces Suh has called home. Modest in scale at 38.5 by 34.5 centimetres and signed by the artist, this cyanotype offers collectors direct entry into one of contemporary art's most searching and emotionally precise explorations of memory, security, and the places we carry with us long after we leave.

Medium
Cyanotype
Overall
Signed
Yes

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About this work

Do Ho Suh, Alarm Keypad, Unit G5, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7SB, UK, 2017

A small alarm keypad rendered in the luminous blue-white tones of a cyanotype print, this work distills an entire psychology of home into one ordinary object. Do Ho Suh has long investigated the emotional weight carried by domestic architecture, and here that inquiry contracts to its most intimate scale, a numbered security panel photographed in the flat he occupied at Union Wharf in London. The full address inscribed in the title is no bureaucratic detail but a deliberate act of specificity, anchoring memory to a precise location and asserting that home is not an abstraction but a layered accumulation of lived experience within particular walls. The cyanotype process, with its blueprint-like washes of cyan and white, transforms a mundane fixture into something closer to a specimen preserved under glass, both familiar and eerily distant. Suh is best known for his large-scale fabric sculptures that reconstruct former residences in Seoul, Providence, Berlin, and New York at exact dimensions, architecture rendered soft and translucent in an attempt to carry place across displacement. This smaller work belongs to the same sustained meditation but arrives through a different material logic. The keypad, which once authenticated belonging and granted passage, now exists as a silhouetted record of habitation, a kind of evidence. Number 26 in a series of 30 unique photographs, it occupies a considered position within a finite body of work that collectively maps the spaces Suh has called home. Modest in scale at 38.5 by 34.5 centimetres and signed by the artist, this cyanotype offers collectors direct entry into one of contemporary art's most searching and emotionally precise explorations of memory, security, and the places we carry with us long after we leave.

Medium
Cyanotype
Dimensions
overall: 38.5 x 34.5 cm
Year
2017
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
MOCA Cleveland Benefit Auction

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Collected by

Richard Caswell