Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Tate Modern, London, UK
1 May – 19 October 2025
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is currently on view at Tate Modern. I saw it a few weeks ago and I believe it’s the must-see show of the season in London. Visually stunning and conceptually rich, it’s one of those exhibitions that stays with you and invites deep reflection.
Do Ho Suh’s first solo exhibition in London brings together large-scale installations, drawings, sculptures and videos that explore ideas of home, identity, memory, and belonging. As you move through the show — shaped by Suh’s experiences in Seoul, New York, and London — you’re prompted to reflect: What is home for you? When does a building become a home? What memories do the spaces you inhabit carry?
Suh is a South Korean artist best known for recreating domestic and architectural spaces using delicate materials like fabric and paper. After earning his BFA and MFA in Korean painting from Seoul National University, he moved to the U.S., where he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and then completed an MFA in sculpture at Yale. He practiced in New York for over a decade before relocating to London in 2010. Suh represented South Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.
The exhibition title, Walk the House, refers to a Korean expression linked to the hanok — traditional houses that could be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. This idea of a portable, shifting home runs through Suh’s work. His immersive installations examine how architecture, memory, and lived experience intersect — asking not just where we live, but how.
As you enter the exhibition, you encounter Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–22), a moving piece created through the traditional Korean practice of rubbing. Suh covered the entire surface of his childhood home in Seoul with sheets of paper and gently rubbed them to capture every architectural detail — an act that feels like a loving gesture toward a space filled with personal history. The resulting impressions, later reassembled on an aluminium frame, form a ghostly, intimate replica — a fragile imprint of memory, loss, and deep affection.
Opposite this, you’ll find one of his most recognisable works: Nest/s (2024), a colourful corridor of stitched translucent fabric that recreates liminal architectural spaces — thresholds, hallways, entrances. It’s beautiful to walk through, with transparent fabric panels sewn in astonishing detail using a technique reminiscent of bojagi (traditional Korean patchwork). This work speaks to Suh’s interest in fabric architecture — spatial forms constructed from memory, emotion, and thread. His fabric structures envelop the viewer like garments, calling to mind the symbolism of the hanbok, Korea’s traditional clothing, merging intimacy and architectural scale.
The art blueberry next to Nest/s (2024)
Staircase in 2D
Another work that stood out for me was a yellow rubbing of fixtures and fittings from the New York apartment where Suh lived for 20 years. What captivated me was the sheer intricacy — every light switch, pipe, and screw carefully transferred to paper with painstaking detail. The craftsmanship is extraordinary, and it’s easy to become absorbed in the quiet, obsessive precision of the piece. It makes visible the overlooked elements of domestic life, turning the mundane into something poetic and visually magnetic.
The artist’s sense of being “haunted” by past spaces is also beautifully captured in Home Within Home, where Suh uses 3D printing techniques to merge two buildings he previously lived in — one in Seoul and another in the U.S. The result is a dreamlike hybrid space, scaled down and folded into itself, blurring the distinction between locations and memories.
There’s also Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a new installation mapping Suh’s current London home. Brightly coloured fittings — doorknobs, light switches, electrical sockets — are colour-coded to match the different cities where the artist and his family have lived. It playfully raises questions about how we relate to the objects we live with, and how they mark time and place. It’s interesting how we forget about them until they stop working.
A deeply personal piece features tunics made by Suh’s wife for their children, each with pockets containing their favourite small objects. It’s a tender gesture, one that links memory, care, and the physicality of home.
The exhibition also includes Suh’s lesser-known works on paper — intricate thread drawings where coloured threads are sewn into handmade paper to echo architectural outlines.
Thread drawings part of the exhibition
And two video works — Robin Hood Gardens (2018) and Dong In Apartments (2022) — use photogrammetry to digitally reconstruct buildings Suh has inhabited, exploring architecture as a living memory, and acknowledging that the attempt to preserve home is always incomplete.
The show closes with Bridge Project, a conceptual “perfect home” located at the North Pole — imagined as the midpoint between all the places Suh has lived. This fictional home, surrounded by melting ice, becomes a haunting metaphor for global instability and displacement.
Though not a full retrospective, Walk the House is a generous survey of Suh’s practice. I found his work powerful not only for its beauty and use of traditional Korean fabric techniques, but for its timeliness. In a moment when housing insecurity and migration are global concerns, Suh’s art invites us to ask what it means to carry home within us — wherever we go.
I’m reminded of a quote by Tad Williams that feels especially relevant here: “Never make your home a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head… That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”
Tickets: £20 / Free for Members.
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