My first step would tear its first step

I trudge through the concrete building, up unyielding steps, I turn the corner and I am confronted by another staircase. It is unlike any other I have seen before. One that will never creak, but might tear.

It is in the centre of a large white room. Light, from windows on the left, passes through it. It is red. Its first step – if you are ascending, or the last if you are descending - hovers at least half a metre from the ground. From afar you might think it is made of cloud. Closer it seems to be a red gauze. The light switch, the steps, the banister, the wall fittings – all made of this gauze, Perhaps it was spun by celestial spiders. Closer still you can see it swaying gently in the draught. The white ceiling is obscured by the red floor at the top of this stairway, which stretches across the expanse of the room. It occupies the room with such serenity that I could easily believe that the concrete building has been constructed solely to encase, protect and keep sacrosanct what is before me, all the other rooms mere preparation for this one.

There are others in this room. Watching, daring to touch, walking round, contemplating, playing, flirting, crying, laughing, chatting – all of them, like me: lumpen, fleshy, gravity bound, inevitably and unbearably weightier than the architecture at the centre of the illuminated space.

These thoughts tumble by as I turn the corner and absorb its impact. On first encounter I feel a glove has been thrown to my feet, a provocative mocking of my mass. A dare to climb the staircase. A dare laced with the full knowledge that I cannot. That my first step would tear its first step. And so I must remain bound to the white floor. I can look, I can imagine, but I shan’t enter.

What lightness would I need to ascend this stairway? What weight might I shed to achieve it? An extreme diet? Burdensome memories? Could it be a quality of character I am lacking, one of ethics, one of knowledge, of self-discipline, of self-awareness, of grace? Is there a state of being to be reached that would allow this ascension to the red floor? If only for a beat, for a nanosecond?

All this is evoked and as quickly crumbles, when I must recognise the staircase is an artwork. ‘Staircase – V’, in fact. It is made of polyester and stainless steel tubes. It is the work of Do Ho Suh, born 1962, and a team of old craftswomen, with rare skills not likely to be passed on to another generation. It is part of a group show – Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery. It is not a mythic doorway but an evocation of an apartment he once lived in. It is these bare facts that I temporarily escape or avoid, and in the duration of escape and avoidance become like a free-runner re-mapping the routes of thought prescribed of me, creating and projecting my own paths and structures.