This was London-based Suh’s second residency at STPI. It was during his first visit in 2010 that the artist conceived his thread drawings that comprise delicate exultations of colorful threading embedded within thick handmade paper. In a unique process conceived in collaboration with STPI artisans, Suh’s original drawings are transferred onto gelatin sheets, and their outlines are sewn in strata of variously colored threads. The gelatin sheets are then immersed in paper pulp, where they dissolve, leaving only the artist’s gestural sketches of thready color and texture within the thick, handmade paper. Suh elaborated on this technique in “New Works,” recalibrating his customary architectural motifs alongside self-images. In the latter, he portrays silhouettes and profiles in frenetic, repetitive progression and expansion. One gallery hall is lined with works in varying sizes and iterations of color, all depicting scores of such figures and many titled Myselves (2014), where multitudes of forms emanate from thickly massed, threadwork legs, morphing into wispy filaments of loosely rendered faces.

Most of Suh’s figure-based works at STPI involve robust collages consisting of multilayered striations of thread. One of the works entitledMyselves is a nearly two-meter-tall threadwork in blazing, vital red; a smaller work comprises a modest clutch of cool blue silhouettes. In these and additional works like Karma (2015), Suh’s forms transition upward and forward as if striding through space and time; others, as in I Am Your Conduit (2014), are wreathed in questing threads. One exception is the singular Father and Daughter (2013), where a solitary black-threaded figure is shown sprinting alone, crowned by a pink, goddess-like female.

The large-scale threadwork My Homes (2014) is a composite of hundreds of naïve images that include his ubiquitous houses—many ingenuous and rudimentary, others embellished with legs, wheels, parachutes, people, color and dimension. Hanging nearby in the gallery, among some dozen smaller, idiosyncratic house- and figure-based variations, two scribbly red threadworks titled Staircase (2014) are overlaid with a bit of gossamer fabric, evoking the dimensional translucence of Suh’s installations.

Suh is one of a handful of artists whose vocabulary is architectural memory. British artist Rachel Whiteread’s massive castings of negative interior space, for example, are ponderous monuments to a shared past, just as Suh’s installations are aims at its diaphanous reduction. Perhaps closer in spirit to Suh’s intent are the works of Indian-born American printmaker Zarina Hashmi, another itinerant whose unsentimental explorations of “home” include minimalist floor plans and rudimentary outlines of buildings where she has lived around the world.

Suh’s careful, unpeopled installations are frozen in time and never indulge in regret, and there is something dispassionate and tenuous about their nostalgia. But the artist’s “New Works” on paper are brisk: they are loosely rendered, absurd and quirky. Through houses sprouting wheels, parachutes and legs, and unbound self-images that juggle, sprint and fly, the artist transposes the sober confines of memory into lively allegory.

“Do Ho Suh: New Works” is on view at Singapore Tyler Print Institute until January 2, 2016.