Doh Hoh Suh @ Tate Modern
A window is a metaphysical space of existential reflection whereby ‘in’ and ‘out’ are dialectically made visible with a single glance—it is a necessary place to ponder alienation. This duality has long inspired my practice, as evidenced by my resonance to Do Hoh Suh. His work on passageways and liminal spaces embodies the transitions existing within and between established realities.
Right in the midst of creating and preparing for the Degree show in the Summer, I had a fantastic opportunity to visit Do Hoh Suh’s ‘Walk the House’ exhibition at Tate Modern. Focusing on memories embedded in domestic spaces, the exhibition showcases fragments of rooms, spaces, as well as hallways of his past residencies through his large-scale spatial works. Do Hoh Suh’s ability to recreate these structures is rooted in his deep sentimentality for the interplay of space and memory.
I was especially drawn to Nest/s (2024), the centerpiece of the exhibition. In It, Do Hoh Suh uses fabric and metal structures to construct an ‘impossible’ architecture, joining disparate corridors into a continuous passageway. This work, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior, raised a critical question for my own pieces: What is the significance of recreating domestic fragments, and how does this relate to my core exploration of ‘inbetweenness’?
Development from Tension to Liminal Space
Leading up towards the Summer show, my practice developed towards the notion of inbetweenness, initially defined by opposing forces coexisting through tension. This concept serves as both a barrier and a bridge, drawn from the personal conflict I feel when expressing myself to the public and my tendency towards conceptual extremes. To articulate this struggle, I use the window as a metaphor and as a fundamental connector as well as a boundary between my internal and external realities.
My approach is strongly informed by Paul Basy’s essay, The Inbetweenness of Things (2017), which positions the concept of inbetweenness as a vital relational space; a hybrid middle ground that emphasizes nuance and interplay over binary opposition.
Conversations in ISIC 2025
The weekend before the Summer show, I was invited as one of the speakers for Indonesian Scholars International Convention 2025 in Imperial College alongside Dr. Patrick Hartono, a Computational Arts Lecturer and researcher at Goldsmith, now teaching at RMIT. We presented “Is Ai Art Legit? Learning, Navigating, and Transcending Machine Creativity”, focusing on the challenges of AI Art within the Indonesian context.
Indonesian Scholars International Convention 2025 (credit: PPI UK)
My discussions with Dr. Patrick offered an essential insight that indirectly influenced my understanding towards my practice. He argued that the immediate challenge facing us, far more critical than AI, is Indonesia’s culture of rigid categorization. In Indonesia, disciplines are strictly contained, where he argues that the key to unite Indonesian diversity lies within the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration. As he summarized: “The moment we can see art as more than mere entertainment, and science as something other than exact and undisputed, is when we can make progress and flourish.”
This critique of strict categorization immediately highlighted the deep influence of binary logic on my own worldview and how I still have a lot of unlearning to do. While this simplistic framework is initially beneficial for early understanding, this mindset hardens into a habit that severely restricts intellectual critical movement. It results in creating closed-minded walls, preventing interdisciplinary collaboration and diverse thought. By reducing complex matters to simplified binaries, I have unconsciously robbed myself of the ability to appreciate nuances and potential that exist in the middle ground between defined poles.
The struggle against this binary system and my search for a middle ground is rooted in my experience as an Indonesian in the 21st century, where categorization is so ingrained in Indonesia’s modern culture that anything that fails to fit is often discarded or lost. To me, fitting into a certain concept provides safety and saves me from anxiety.
The necessity of defining this controlled threshold addresses Guy Debord’s critique in The Society of the Spectacle. He argues that modern life is dominated by the spectacle, a system that replaces authentic experiencde with mediated representation, demanding that identity is consumed as easily digestible, fixed categories. Modern society thrives on simple, non-ambiguous representation. You are either A or B, this or that, inside or outside.
Stepping outside that cultural bubble and engaging with a wider global community has expanded my worldview and also enabled me to reconnect with Indonesia’s traditional roots: the underappreciated concept of dualism, identifying opposing elements as complementary rather than contradictory.
My identity as an individual was shaped by modern Indonesian culture, which prioritizes categorization, compelling me to construct an anxious, personal boundary —a threshold that guarantees safety. Though my surrounding environment contributed to this anxiety, I am slowly dismantling this self-imposed structure and fighting the binary logic it imposed. I am slowly transforming these rigid structures into portals of connection, choosing to embrace the complexity and possibility of the liminal middle ground.
Windows: separation and connection as a portal
Windows have become the central, recurring element in my work. Initially, I interpreted these architectural structures primarily as a vehicle for tension, defining the liminal space of the ‘inbetween’ as a struggle between opposing binaries. Through research, discussions, and material experimentation, my understanding has evolved. I now see these opposing forces not as a source of conflict, but as a space for collaboration, initiating a dialogue between the materials and the audience engaging with the piece.
By definition, a window is a transitional opening and necessary threshold, designed to admit light and provide visual access while holding the external world at bay. It is a medium that allows a space to exist as a room, not a vacuum. As Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, the window is a cosmic symbol; a frame through which we confront both the vastness of the world and the reality of our own smallness. This duality connects us to something larger while grounding us in the immediacy of the present moment.
Simulacrum and the Metaphor
My practice realizes this liminal space through the decorative window grills, drawing personal inspiration from the ornate patterns of my childhood home in Indonesia. This decision to draw inspiration from the windows of my childhood anchors the work in my intimate, lived experience. The recreation of these domestic fragments serves as comfort of familiarity, yet carries a profound sense of emotional weight.
In my windows, the sturdy lines evoke constraint and custody, the decorative quality of the lattice design numbs any hostile power that straight bars would have. It invites the gaze to linger, but firmly stops the body from proceeding.
Act of Reproduction
What conceptual weight does the intentional construction of making my own windows carry? The context of controlled, self-fabricated art object inherently differs from an actual architectural opening. By constructing these fragments, an inquiry comes to mind: is this a window, or is this a ‘window’? Why is it necessary to recreate these domestic fragments of home, and what unique effect does the replication have on the space they ultimately occupy?
(credits: MoMA New York)
In contextualizing the act of reproduction, I found similarities and inspiration from American sculptor Robert Gober. Through his practice, he meticulously remakes mundane objects like sinks inspired from his childhood homes, with domestic basins featuring holes where hardware and plumbing should be, rendering them non functional. Through his works, he subtracts an object of personal childhood memory and transforms it. By recontextualizing a domestic fragment in an exhibition space, the object becomes a metaphor for broader psychological or cultural issues. Crucially, this elevation does not diminish the object’s status. Rather, it amplifies its ability to evoke complex meaning by presenting the familiar in a different environment.
My construction of windows functions as both a simulacrum and a metaphor. Rather than making a perfect copy of the windows that inspired it, I take fragments and the core idea of the window to inform the fabrication. By divorcing materials like metal and chiffon from their original architectural context and function, the artwork becomes a simulacrum, a representation that challenges the reality of the actual window it references. This intentional separation transforms the object into a metaphor: the act of fragmentation directly mirrors my perspective of the separation of inner and outer spaces, speaking not just of security, but the psychological boundary of the liminal threshold.
Defining What’s Inside and What’s Outside
When constructing my own windows, a fundamental question becomes prevalent: Must the inside and outside spaces of the boundary be definitely defined? As the artist, I believe this ambiguity is central to my work and should remain unsolved. By placing these fabricated windows within an exhibition space, it makes us ask: In relation to the artwork, are we standing on the inside or outside of the window? I aim for this subjective engagement to challenge the binary definitions of space and position
These questions about spatial definition are possible because of how I treat space as an essential active part of my artwork. My work and the space it occupies maintain a symbiotic relationship where they mutually define each other. The meaning is not fixed in the metal and chiffon but emerges from how the piece is activated within a specific site, ensuring that the work is interpreted and experienced in fundamentally different ways according to the context where it’s shown.
Approaching my practice through the expanded way is a core principle of my practice, naturally leading to an outcome delivered through the form of an installation. This sharply contrasts with traditional art that is merely intended to occupy space. As an installation, my work rejects the autonomous object and instead activates the space, interacting with the walls, floor, ceiling, as well as the audience’s physical movement.
The expanded approach in my practice captures the zeitgeist and central idea of the contemporary where ‘everything goes’. In Rosalind Krauss’s foundational essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979), she argues that the transition from modernism towards the contemporary was defined by the rejection of autonomous space. Artwork no longer meant to exist in a space entirely separate from the world around it. Instead, art became relational, defined by its context and its surrounding environment. To fully comprehend an artwork, we must look beyond the artwork as an object, but examine the symbiotic relationship established with the space it exists in.
Space is an indispensable aspect of my artwork because the installation’s conceptual reading is entirely relational. Even though the physical dimension of my artwork remains constant, the perception towards it shifts based on the site where it’s shown. As my practice touches the idea of the inbetween, the correlation between the perceived size and distance of the inner and outer spaces fluctuates according to the space it inhabits. In this sense, the artwork does not just sit in space, it uses the space to continually recalculate its own meaning.
My practice intersects with multiple ideas. While my practice engages with the definitions of expanded sculpture and expanded painting, the most direct correlation is with expanded drawing.
Through the lens of expanded drawing, the line becomes the fundamental, conceptual aspect of the medium, tracing back to its primitive origins (Emma Dexter, To Draw is to be Human, 2007). Dexter asserts that drawing is part of our interrelation to our physical environment, recording in and on it the presence of the human, a trace evident in all architectural structures. My window construction directly correlates with this idea: the lines of my grills, fabricated in a far more advanced material than traditional drawing mediums, represented an expanded, three-dimensional take on this fundamental principle.
This material boundary, the window grill, operates as a Parergon, a concept analyzed by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in Painting (1978). The Parergon (the frame or border) is neither purely inside (belonging to) nor purely outside (separate from) the main work. My work embodies this relational state: It is a boundary that is perpetually ‘inbetween’, challenging the distinction between domestic inside spaces and public outside spaces.
The simultaneous use of chiffon and metal creates an interplay that bridges the expanded concepts of painting and drawing. While the chiffon introduces the transparency of translucency essential to drawing, the notion of the window as a threshold also necessitates accretion and concealment, an aspect essential to painting. This material mediation led me to the conclusion: Although I come from a foundational drawing background, limiting my practice to the category of drawing would be reductive. I am an artist whose practice is situated within the contemporary, drawing upon the conceptual frameworks of sculpture and painting as much as my foundational drawing skills. I choose not to define my work to fit within a single media, but to see it as a part of the complexity and hybridity of contemporary practice.
Conclusion
I’ve come to embrace a practice that is both highly labor-intensive and physically demanding, a process resulting in an artwork that is visually minimal and straightforward. This marked a profound turn from my former outcome-oriented approach, where I lost sight of the central importance of actually engaging with your own practice. I now find that learning, experimenting, and developing comes from the physical process of doing. I recognize that research is fluid and non-linear. It requires embracing setbacks and failures as integral parts of making. Ultimately, the labor and making process is what creates and deepens my relationship with my practice.
This commitment to process is reinforced by a theoretical realization: the root of drawing as a media lies in its inherit commitment to eternal incompletion. As a conceptual practice, drawing always re-enacts imperfection and incompletion. This deepens my shift in my practice, transforming my artistic outcomes from fixed final works into never-ending tests. Fixating on a singular correct outcome previously made my process static. By embracing the fluidity and imperfect nature of art-making, I transformed my practice into a continuous learning curve.
Images
Suh, D. H. (2024) Nest/s [Polyester and stainless steel] In: The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Tate Modern, London. (Photographed by K. S. Wangsaatmadja, 2025).
‘Is Ai Art Legit? Learning, Navigating and Transcending Machine Creativity’ [Presentation/Session]. In: Indonesian Scholars international Convention 2025. PPI UK. (Photographed by PPI UK, 2025).
Wangsaatmadja, K. S. (2024) Windows of my home
Wangsaatmadja, K. S. (2025) Open Ended Boundaries [Mixed media installation, metal and chiffon]. Dimensions variable (54×44, 300 x 100, 250×100 cm). (Photographed by Iris Zheng, 2025).
Gober, R. (1984) Untitled [Plaster, wood, wire lath, aluminum, watercolor, and semigloss enamel paint]. 28 × 33 × 22 1/2″ (71.1 × 83.8 × 57.2 cm). New York: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Wangsaatmadja, K. S. (2025) Open Ended Boundaries in various exhibition spaces[Mixed media installation, metal and chiffon]. Dimensions variable. (Documentation by Iris Zheng, 2025).
References
Bachelard, G. (2014) The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. New York: Penguin Books.
Basu, P. (ed.) (2017) The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Cheung, C-F. (2004) ‘Separation and Connection: Phenomenology of Door and Window’. In: Carr, D. and Cheung, C-F. (eds.) Space, Time and Culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 253-262.
Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Derrida, J. (1987) The Truth in Painting. Translated by G. Bennington and I. McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dexter, E. (2005) ‘To Draw is to be Human’. In: Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. London: Phaidon Press.
Gober, R. (1984) Double Sink. [Sculpture]. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago.
Krauss, R. E. (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. October, Vol. 8, pp. 30-44.
MoMA (2014) Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor. [Online]. Available at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1452
Tate (2025) The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. [Online]. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/the-genesis-exhibition-do-ho-suh/exhibition-guide
About the author
Ken Syakira Wangsaatmadja is a visual artist from Jakarta, currently residing in London. She explores the idea of inbetweenness through expanded drawing. She recently graduated from the MA Fine Art: Drawing program from Camberwell College of Arts in 2025. instagram | website