The Artist Who Keeps Remaking His Childhood Home

New York Times

01-05-2025

The artist Do Ho Suh's London studio is a mazelike series of spaces within a Victorian warehouse complex in the northern Islington neighborhood. In one room, a wall is covered in monochromatic mesh maquettes of sculptures that resemble his former homes in Seoul, New York and Berlin. In another, spools of rainbow-toned fiber line workbenches and shelves; Suh, 63, and his team of about a dozen will pull from them to create his shaggy 'thread drawings,' which depict bodies and architectural structures that dissolve into masses of fine lines, embedded in handmade paper. On the other side of a central, winding staircase is the room where the artist does his mechanical work: At a wooden table, a robotic arm hovers above a prototype of one of his house-inspired sculptures in red thermoplastic polyester, a material that's become one of Suh's signatures.
Just as each part of his studio tells a different story about his practice, many of Suh's house sculptures combine rooms from various times and places in the artist's life. These works, which have defined his three-decade career, are typically life-size, made from gauzy, colorful fabric with an ethereal quality. 'Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home' (2013), for example, mimics a Russian doll: A replica of Suh's childhood home in Seoul is engulfed by a true-to-size fabric imitation of the three-story Providence, R.I., townhouse where he lived when he first moved to the United States in 1991. For 'Staircase-III' (2010), he created a red, semitransparent polyester and steel staircase inspired by the apartment in New York's Chelsea neighborhood that he rented for almost twenty years starting in the mid-1990s, though this version hangs upside-down from the ceiling. Suh's works are as much about precise re-creation — incorporating details as small as light switches and plug sockets — as they are about distortion. Ultimately, they capture how the act of relocation can influence memory.
Though Suh is the son of an artist — the influential Seoul-based abstract ink painter Suh Se-ok, who died in 2020 — he had early ambitions to be a marine biologist, in part because of his fascination with an anonymously created 10-panel painting of groups of fish swimming together that his parents displayed in their home. When he began making art, he similarly fixated on how temporary homes and communities are made and then left behind. He learned traditional painting techniques at Seoul National University in the 1980s, then went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at Rhode Island School of Design and Yale, where his work became more sculptural. Suh made his first true-to-scale duplication of his childhood house in 1999: 'Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home' is fully collapsible, constructed entirely from silk organza in the same light jade green as the original ceilings of that dwelling, which his father built in the 1970s, itself a replica of a 19th-century, Yi dynasty residence. As Suh puts it, 'I make highly personal spaces public.'
For his major survey exhibition at Tate Modern in London, which opens this week, Suh has created a new piece, 'Nest/s' (2024), that places eight semitransparent fabric rooms and passageways from his different homes in one long line. Visitors can walk through the work, which Suh calls a 'time and space entanglement' — the structures' edges overlap, much like the artist's memories of each place. The exhibition also includes the 2018 video 'Robin Hood Gardens,' which was filmed at a Brutalist housing project of the same name in Britain in 2017, just before it was demolished, its tenants having been forcibly removed. A translucent screen divides that video's projection from other nearby works in the show, allowing some of its light to leak onto the external walls of Suh's replica of his childhood home, 'Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home' (2013-22). The blurring between the two works mirrors the artist's practice as a whole: deeply personal, yet also porous, making room for the presence — and interpretation — of strangers.
In March, seated at a large table in his studio, Suh answered T's Artist's Questionnaire.
What's your day like? How much do you sleep, and what's your work schedule?
I'm not the kind of artist who will come to the studio at 8 a.m. and work all day. For about eight years, until two years ago, I had to wake up [early] to take my two daughters to school. But I've never been a morning person; now, I wake up when I want to wake up.
What's the first piece of art you ever made?
The oldest piece that still exists is one I made when I was four. I scribbled [random markings] on one of my mother's cabinets. It's fading, but I know where it is. My first 'real' art was probably 'The Work,' a set of painted, folding screens I made in graduate school [at Seoul National University] in 1987.
What's the worst studio you ever had?
It was in Dumbo, [Brooklyn], around 2000. It was a shithole, I have to say. There were dogs running around in the streets outside. People were mugged all the time. The building was huge, and there were rats everywhere. I was there for three or four years but I didn't know my neighbors until right before I moved out. They were making porn films! I came out of the studio and there was a lady passing by, completely naked. Strange things happen in New York.
What's the first work you ever sold? For how much?
An etching that I made [at Seoul National University] called 'Heaven and Earth.' It sold for probably around $30.
When you start a new piece, where do you begin?
It feels like I have a carousel or Ferris wheel spinning in my mind all the time, with ideas that have already been conceived and are waiting to find the moment to come out.
How do you know when you're done?
My work is completed as soon as I conceive the idea. The rest is just making it happen — [that's when] I face obstacles. But the important thing in my practice is how much of the purity of the idea is in the final piece. The last thing I want is to create a piece that's been compromised. That's my rule, which makes my team mad.
How many assistants do you have?
In the traditional sense I probably have two to three assistants. They help with physical things. But I hardly ever call them assistants; they're team members. The rest of my team is about nine people, and they're all young professionals who have their own expertise [like mechanical production and studio management]. I can't make art without them. The way I try to run my studio is to be open and democratic.
Have you assisted other artists before?
I did for maybe two days when I was a graduate student. I studied at Columbia for one year before I went to Yale, and I helped my professor, [the American artist] Jon Kessler, organize his studio in New York. I supported myself financially by doing carpentry, graphic design, album covers and sometimes translations or interpretations [for example, between Korean shop owners and a film crew working with them].
What music do you play when you're making art?
When I'm starting on drawings, I have to concentrate, so I don't listen to anything. When I feel like the work is going well, then I bring music in: I'll listen to my daughters' rock and pop school concerts over and over again. During in-between times, like when I'm tidying the studio, I listen to Buddhist chanting.
When did you first feel comfortable saying you're a professional artist?
I was having the hardest time right after Yale in the late 1990s. I moved to New York and was living in this tiny apartment and couldn't find a studio. There was a financial crisis in Korea and the money was slashed for all the projects I was doing there. My future wasn't clear at all. I was lying on my bed one day after I came back from this carpentry job and all of a sudden, I had this thought, 'I'm going to be an artist.' It probably should've been the time when I decided to give up, but I had clarity in that moment.
What do you do when you're procrastinating?
My father was a painter, and he was also a professor at Seoul National University. He was always late to class. He spent hours every day in his garden picking up pine needles one by one. I now find myself doing very similar things. I have a lot of downtime and people think I'm not doing anything creative. I do all the laundry at home, and I love folding it. But it's not really procrastinating; I could come up with an idea while I'm doing that. I don't think artists ever rest. I wish I could go on holiday and just switch off. There's this thin thread that artists are always trying to hold onto.
What's the last thing that made you cry?
Small cry or big cry? I have a lot of small cries, but my last big cry came totally unexpectedly in November. My father passed away four years ago, and the family donated his paintings to the local council [in Korea]. We're trying to build a small museum — it's 3,000 pieces of his own work and his collection [which includes pieces by the 18th-century Korean landscape painter Gyeomajae Jeong Seon and the 19th-century calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui]. It's been a long process, and in November, finally, the Korean government approved the funding. That was the biggest hurdle. When I heard that news I couldn't stop crying. I also cry every time I leave Korea and say goodbye to my mum. When I see the expression on her face.
What do you pay for rent?
Every month is different. We rent temporary spaces project by project.
What do you bulk buy with most frequency?
Probably toilet paper. And maybe espresso capsules.
Do you exercise?
Yes, mostly for my mobility. A little bit of stretching and weight training.
Are you binging on any shows right now?
'Dance Moms.' It's torture. But the rest of my family loves it, so we watch it together.
What are you reading?
I just finished a book on beetles, 'Lucanidae of the World' (2023) by Dooseok Yi. He's an architect, not a professional biologist, but he is obsessed with distinguishing subspecies. The pictures are so beautiful. I'm also reading 'Einstein's Dreams' (1992) by Alan Lightman, a book about theoretical physics that tries to explain the origin of the universe and time. It's a simplified version, like physics for dummies. I want to be reborn as a physicist; I think they're close to unlocking the secrets of the universe. I've found so many similarities between quantum physics and Buddhism.
What's your favorite artwork by someone else?
I don't have a single one, but Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of my favorite artists of all time. His stacks of candies and of posters that visitors could take for free were such a generous gesture. [In works like 'Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)' (1991), Gonzalez-Torres allowed viewers to remove pieces of the installations, as a way of symbolizing loss and the diminishment of loved ones living with H.I.V./AIDS.] I want to have a similar type of generosity: I let the viewer explore my work as freely as possible [by allowing them to walk through each structure].
Which work of your own do you regret, or would you do over in a different way now?
I never feel 100 percent satisfied with the work, but I wouldn't use the word 'regret.' I think there's a reason every single work is there. Sometimes the idea is great, but I realize it won't answer all my questions. But that leads to other projects. It's a different mechanism than regret: It's motivation to keep making work.