Do Ho Suh’s Monumental Fabric Homes Probe Urgent Questions in an Age of Borders

“What is the perfect home to you? Can such a thing exist?” artist Do Ho Suh asks Sarah Fine, a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge who is also a collaborator with Suh on his ongoing Bridge Project, which interrogates the idea of “perfect home.” He continues, “Do we need borders? Can we actually dissolve them?”

Standing before Suh’s beautiful, delicate monumental installations—currently on view at “The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House,” the artist’s first solo show at London’s Tate Modern in two decades—these loaded questions like much more than personal reflections or academic thought experiments.

The exhibition opens at a time when immigration has been dominating the U.K. news headlines. The Labour government has proposed a major policy overhaul to control borders and reduce the number of migrants in the country, sparking controversy and claims that it amounts to anti-immigration. In London where the exhibition is staged, about 41 percent of its population was born abroad, including the Korean conceptualist who has called the city home since 2016. Given the current context, is it possible to mute the noises of current affairs while appreciating Suh’s art for its own sake?

Probably not. Suh’s decades-long exploration of the concept of home, memories, and cyclicality of time draws from his experiences of moving across the world—from Seoul to New York and later London. He admits that he did not think much about home until he left his native Seoul in 1991. His colorful, scintillating fabric architectural sculptures have captivated audiences not only for their aesthetic beauty. The works are deeply personal, and yet universally relatable.

The exhibition’s title, “Walk the House,” comes from a Korean phrase the 62-year-old heard when he was young. It describes the process of transporting hanok, or a traditional Korean house, from one place to another by taking it down and reassembling it. While most of us do not carry a physical home when we relocate, the idea of a transportable home speaks to more than architecture—it refers to “an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one,” Suh noted in a statement. His oeuvre physically manifests the impalpable emotional baggage we carry, but can find difficult to articulate. He is asking the important questions held by many, on our behalf.

An example is Nest/s (2024), an enthralling installation newly created for this landmark show. Resonating with his signature fabric mesh architectural sculptures, this colossal piece is a collection of 1:1 scale replicas of the spaces where Suh had lived and worked— from bathrooms to kitchen and corridors—across Seoul and New York, to London and Berlin. Stitched together into one interconnected passage, Nest/s invites viewers to walk through.

Though walking through the translucent Nest/s guarantees striking photo ops for social media junkies, ultimately it is a poignant journey through Suh’s memory that inspires viewers to reflect on their own personal trajectories.

Another new work, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), offers a similar experience. In this semi-transparent room that draws from the artist’s current home, replicas of mundane objects like doorknobs, telephones and light switches—made from the same materials in a variety of colors with assistance from traditional seamstresses—are affixed all over the interiors.

Suh employs the technique of rubbing—placing paper on surfaces and transferring their textures with graphite—in his Rubbing/Loving series (the writing of “rubbing” and “loving” in Korean is the same, according to the artist). Standing next to Nest/s is Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home 2013-22, shown for the second time since it was debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia in 2022. Suh began working on this project in 2013, covering the exterior of the hanok—his childhood home that his family built in the 1970s—with hundreds of pieces of Mulberry paper, and then painstakingly rubbing every single inch of the surface of the house with graphite pencil, as documented in an accompanying video.

Another work, Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater 2012, reflecting on the aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which marks its 45th anniversary this year. The emotionally charged creations born out of such laborious process are fragile, and yet their ghostly presence lingers like memory itself.

While these eye-catching installations take center stage, the exhibition also features a number of smaller walled works, including many fascinating works on paper that Suh created between 1999 and 2025. Among the highlights are the curious threads drawings and the stunning Staircase 2016, which magically transforms a red staircase model from three-dimensional, to a two-dimensional existence on a flat surface.

Two of Suh’s mesmerizing video works, Robin Hood Gardens (2018) and Dong In Apartments (2022), are also on display, projected on a towering screen at one end of the gallery. These visually compelling titles exploring the insulated worlds of these soon-to-be demolished housing blocks in London and Daegu. They were also featured at the artist’s solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center in Seoul last year.

While some critics have complained about the presentation’s lack of balance, as these quieter works are easily overshadowed by the larger-than-life installations in a single open gallery, their inclusion surmises the breadth of Suh’s practice.

The exhibition concludes with a darkened space dedicated to the Bridge Project, an interdisciplinary research experiment that Suh has been working on since 1999. Comprised of videos, drawings, and installations, it is born from the artist’s search for the perfect home. In his imagination, that home sits in the Arctic Ocean, an equidistant point between Seoul, New York, and London—the three cities he has called home. He has thought of various scenarios and circumstances that would allow him to reach that “perfect home” and survive the challenging living conditions: building an impossible bridge, creating an inflatable structure containing necessities for survival including dumplings, and donning an inflatable suit known as Perfect Home S.O.S. (Smallest Occupiable Shelter) (2024).

Suh’s imagination may be wild, but he is loyal and truthful to his premise, as seen in his conversation with philosophy professor Fine, documented in the project’s newspaper available at the exhibition. In response to Suh’s questions, Fine maintains that no one should be denied access to home, and “[m]ovement shouldn’t be seen as abnormal. It is what we do. We need to find ways to exist and coexist, and accommodate the realities of mobility.”

“The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House” is on view at Tate Modern in London until October 19, 2025.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com