Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern

Tate Modern presents a landmark exhibition of Do Ho Suh’s practice, marking the first major solo showing of his work in London for a generation. The artist invites visitors to explore his large-scale installations, sculptures, videos and drawings, asking questions about home, memory, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us. The exhibition surveys the breadth and depth of Suh’s practice over the last three decades, spanning­ locations including Seoul, New York, and London – the three cities he has called home, and featuring new site-specific works on display for the first time.

The exhibition’s title ‘Walk the House’ is drawn from a Korean expression Suh heard during the construction of his childhood home in Seoul referring to the hanok – a traditional Korean house that could be disassembled, transported and reassembled at a new site, a process imagined as ‘walking the house’. Reflecting this idea of a transportable home, Suh’s immersive works examine the relationship between architecture, the body and memory, as well as how we carry multiple places with us across space and time. The artist has stated: ‘The space I’m interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one. For me, ‘space’ is that which encompasses everything.’

Suh welcomes viewers to fill his works both physically with their presence and psychologically with their inner worlds, inviting visitors to walk through his fabric architectures – translucent 1:1 scale replicas of spaces in which he has lived and worked. These include the ambitious new installation Nest/s 2024, which colourfully weaves together rooms, corridors and entryways from buildings across Seoul, New York, London and Berlin to form one continuous, impossible architecture. Also presented for the first time is Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul 2024, an outline of the artist’s present home in London filled with sewn architectural features from domestic spaces in which he and his family have previously lived, such as doorknobs, light switches and electrical sockets.

Major installations such as Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home 2013-22 – created through the labour-intensive process of rubbing the surfaces of buildings with graphite or coloured pencil – reflect on how spaces can bear witness to both personal and collective memory. In the newly reconfigured Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater 2012, rubbing becomes a way to reflect on the violent aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980, asking what memories spaces might carry against the grain of official histories. Outside the entrance to the exhibition visitors are surrounded by Who Am We? 2000, a wallpaper made up of tens of thousands of tiny portrait photographs collected from sources including school yearbooks – an early example of the artist’s exploration into the relationship between individual and group identity. ‘I was challenging people’s ability to see differences’, Suh notes.

Alongside these expansive installations, the exhibition brings together works on paper created between 1999 and 2025 which allow Suh to create portable versions of built environments. The evocative Staircase 2016, made by dissolving a gelatine tissue scale model into wet paper pulp, translates the three-dimensional form onto a two-dimensional plane. The artist's intricate and vibrant thread drawings explore subjects to which Suh has repeatedly returned throughout his career, including impermanence, the cyclicality of time, and the interconnectedness of relationships. Much of Suh’s work is conceptually rooted in his training in Korean ink painting, which limits the painter’s control of the image due to the instantaneous embedding of ink into paper’s fibres.

Tate Modern also presents two of Suh’s video works – Robin Hood Gardens 2018 and Dong In Apartments 2022- which focus on 20th-century housing blocks in London and Daegu ahead of their demolition. Addressing the rapidly changing architectural fabric of cities, they consider the relationship between a building and a home. Using advanced technology and processes such as photogrammetry – the stitching together of images to produce a digital model of the physical world – and flythrough camera techniques, Suh engages with the built environment as a living organism, a witness to the traces left behind by past inhabitants. Architectural modelling software and 3D printing are used to merge two of Suh’s previous homes in Home Within Home 2025, exploring the cultural differences he experienced upon moving from Seoul to the US. The exhibition culminates in a space dedicated to Suh’s ongoing Bridge Project – an interrogation of an impossible ‘perfect home’. Created in collaboration with specialists in architecture, engineering, anthropology and biology, it grapples with how an imagined, hypothetical set of structures intersect with real-world social, political and ecological issues.

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is in partnership with Genesis. It is supported by The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh Supporters Circle and Tate Members. The exhibition is co-curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Senior Curator, International Art (Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational) and Dina Akhmadeeva, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern). The creation and repurposing of artworks in the exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of Genesis.