Celebrated for his sculptures and installations dealing with identity and displacement, 52-year-old Korean artist Do Ho Suh has been making drawings for his highly poetic projects since the mid-1980s. Key to his engaging practice, Suh’s works on paper were initially a testing ground for philosophical ideas about home as a place that continually travels with you, as well as for concepts of karma related to personal and collective memories. Over the years, however, Suh’s drawings—made from colored threads embedded in handmade paper and painstaking rubbings of architectural sites—have come into their own as distinctive works of art that add a new perspective to the age-old medium.

Encompassing both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York gallery spaces, “Drawings” presents a succinct selection of Suh’s works on paper from 2012 to 2014, along with two major installations that were commissioned by the 2012 Gwangju Biennale. Bridging Home-2 (2012), the only collage in the show, offers sequential, schematic views of the Liverpool skyline in England, with a traditional Korean house (based on Suh’s parents’ home) parachuting into a tight spot between two larger buildings. The final sequence of the collage consists of a panoramic photograph showing the fabricated house oddly wedged into an alien environment. Given that Suh recently moved from New York to London, and that the 2012 Liverpool Biennial commissioned the project, the idea that his family home would fall out of the sky and end up where it landed makes perfect sense.

Suh’s Rubbing/Loving Project: Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2014), comprising full-scale rubbings on paper that the artist took of his old apartment, corridor and studio located at the address in the work’s title, dominates Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea gallery. Made over a three-month period when the apartment was between occupants, the blue-pencil-on-vellum rubbings capture the bathroom, kitchen, entrance, floor and front windows of the artist’s former dwelling—as well as various fixtures like the bathroom sink, toilet and tub—in ghostly detail. In creating the work, Suh and his assistants carefully covered each space with paper and captured its memory by rubbing the surface with colored pencils. The various sheets of paper were then cut apart and later reassembled for the “Drawings” exhibition—an amazing task!