Do Ho Suh’s Rubbing/Loving Project: 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York NY 10011, is a personal project of love and memory, but in the end it denies the viewer the access to the artist’s interiority that it seems to promise. Currently on display at the Chelsea outpost of Lehmann Maupin, the work records the artist’s former New York apartment through a series of painstakingly executed rubbings. By covering every surface of his apartment with sheets of tracing paper and rubbing it with blue colored pencil, Suh and his team meticulously documented the various textures and patterns of the floors, walls, and built-in appliances. The entire process is chronicled in a short film on the series, also on display in the gallery.

Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, 2013-14; installation view, Drawings, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

The installation within the gallery space represents the original layout of the apartment; the floor rubbing is set on a plinth in the middle of the room, and the deconstructed rubbings of walls and appliances are tacked up on their corresponding walls by hundreds of red-tipped pins. The only element that conjures its true three-dimensionality is the rubbing of an exterior-facing wall. Recording two windows and an air conditioner, these drawings are mounted on the back of a plaster cast of the building’s exterior. Blocking the gallery’s entrance, this white monolith provides a point of transition from the colorful three-dimensional world outside the gallery to the flat, monochrome installation inside.

Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, 2013-14; installation view, Drawings, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Despite the similarities to Suh’s previous work, in which he models architectural spaces in transparent fabric, the technique used to create Rubbing/Loving Project adds a new level of personal touch. To produce this work, Suh and his team had to physically handle every surface of the apartment, including those that were perhaps overlooked when the apartment was occupied, as if Suh was trying to commit every inch of his former apartment to memory. The result is a kind of skeleton of a place that must have once held many memories for the artist, and every part of it bears testimony to his touch. In an era in which social media and reality television has rendered public much of private life, Suh himself is allowing us to experience the most personal of spaces—his home.

Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, 2013-14; installation view, Drawings, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

The physical touch of the artist is present in every stroke of colored pencil, yet the end result is more sterile than Suh’s previous work. Absent the diaphanous fabric that lends his more well-known works an otherworldly feeling of life and movement, the rubbings seem cartoonish, possessing the surreal feeling of a life-size architect’s blueprint. The room is lifeless, devoid of the trappings of human existence and reduced to its most basic physical elements. Viewers’ efforts to truly experience the personal space of the artist are thwarted, which is perhaps the point of Suh’s project. In committing the apartment to memory through this labor of love, he also manages to strip it of any meaning, both protecting it from and preparing it for consumption by a public with an insatiable appetite for glimpses of the private activities of established artists. Suh’s work allows the viewer to inhabit his apartment, but in doing so he denies the pleasure of a true glimpse into his life.

Do Ho Suh: Rubbing/Loving is on view at Lehmann Maupin through October 25, 2014.

Natasha Rosenblatt lives in New York City, where she is a Masters student in Columbia University’s Modern Art: Critical & Curatorial Studies program. Originally from Berkeley, California, she received her B.A. in Art History from Barnard College.