Love Hotel
Rice
10 x 6 x 3 in
25.4 x 15.2 x 7.6 cm
2012
Richard Humann • Love Hotel • Rice • 10 x 6 x 3 in • 2012
In Love Hotel, Richard Humann explores the tension between cultural tradition and the forces of modernization through an unusual sculptural material: rice. The work takes its inspiration from the love hotels found throughout South Korea, establishments that provide private spaces for intimacy within a society shaped by longstanding traditions of discretion and formality. Often brightly illuminated with neon lights, these hotels can dominate the skylines of small towns and villages. Yet their entrances are deliberately concealed, allowing guests to arrive and depart without attracting attention. Windows fitted with shutters obscure the interior, creating the outward appearance of emptiness despite the steady activity within.
This contrast between public appearance and private reality forms the conceptual foundation of Love Hotel. The hotels embody a cultural negotiation between established social expectations and the realities of contemporary life. Their conspicuous exteriors announce their presence, while their carefully concealed entrances and closed windows preserve an appearance of privacy. What is visible from the outside reveals little of what takes place within.
Humann translates this contradiction into a small monolithic sculpture cast entirely from rice, a material deeply embedded in Korean and broader East Asian foodways and cultural traditions. Rice sustains life, connects generations, and carries associations with domesticity, continuity, and cultural identity. Yet in Love Hotel, it becomes a material subject to inevitable physical change. As the rice dries, its internal structure shifts. Cracks and fissures gradually emerge across the exterior, while the surface begins to yellow. What initially appears solid and self-contained slowly reveals the transformations occurring beneath its surface.
The sculpture’s changing condition echoes the tension between the outward preservation of tradition and the internal pressures of social transformation. Like the hotel whose sealed windows conceal the activity within, the rice monolith initially presents a unified exterior that gives little indication of its internal instability. Over time, however, the changes within become impossible to contain. The surface begins to fracture, making visible a process that was already underway.
The choice of rice is central to this metaphor. A familiar substance associated with nourishment and cultural continuity becomes an unstable sculptural form, revealing that even the most enduring materials are subject to transformation. The work suggests a society negotiating the relationship between inherited customs and contemporary realities, where change may begin quietly and privately before becoming visible in the larger culture.
Love Hotel considers modernization not simply as the replacement of old traditions with new ways of living, but as a more complex process of internal change. Beneath the appearance of continuity, social values and personal behaviors evolve, sometimes in ways that challenge established expectations. Through the gradual cracking and discoloration of the rice monolith, Humann gives physical form to this metamorphosis. The sculpture becomes a portrait of a culture in transition, revealing how the pressures of modern life can alter a society from within long before those changes are fully acknowledged on the surface.
Richard Humann • Love Hotel • Rice • 10 x 6 x 3 in • 2012
Photo credits: Rizwan Mirza / Richard Humann Studio