Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, Tate Modern: ‘Impossible' architecture remade on a human scale

Telegraph

29-04-2025

'You are in London, standing on the second floor of Tate Modern,' states the introduction to this new survey of the 62-year-old Korean artist Do Ho Suh's career. You don't say! Yet, as you wander among his installations, arranged, like buildings on a street, within a vast, open-plan gallery, this apparently superfluous reminder starts to feel necessary.
Are we in London? Or have we been teleported to New York? At points, it seems, we could even be in Seoul. Suh has lived in all three cities, and his work – which he describes as 'impossible' architecture, and which often plays with the notion of 'home', by reimagining it as something flimsy and portable that could be packed into a suitcase – commemorates many of the nondescript houses and apartments he's inhabited.
Nest/s (2024), the show's centrepiece, is a case in point. Fashioned from semi-transparent, brightly coloured polyester, it consists of several contrasting, building-block-like sections, each replicating a room once occupied by Suh, yet stitched together – as they never could be in reality – to create a continuous passageway through which the viewer is invited to walk. Tiny details (doorknobs, security chains, shower heads, toothbrush holders) are reproduced, also in sheer fabric, with astonishing verisimilitude, with the instructions on, say, a fire alarm, or an exhaust fan's logo, picked out in intricate stitching.
There's nothing special about the rooms and corridors these spaces duplicate, but that, surely, is the point. Suh turns something humdrum – the interstitial, forgettable nooks and crannies in which we spend much of our lives – into a glowing, ethereal counterpoint to reality, which the visitor enters while always remaining visible to gallery-goers outside. Suh compares the experience to passing through a 'portal' – an alternate dimension, perhaps, colliding West and East.
Architecture's permanence is thus made porous, tent-like, and poetic; sculpture (traditionally associated with mass) becomes light, see-through, and suggestive. These are buildings of the mind.
Perfect Home (2024), towards the end of the exhibition, takes the conceit further. The white-polyester walls and ceiling of its hangar-like structure, which replicates the volume of Suh's home in London (where he has lived since 2016), are studded, seemingly at random, with small, tangible representations (which he calls 'specimens'), also in colourful translucent polyester fabric, of domestic fixtures and fittings handled daily by the artist in various places over the years.
The effect is uncanny, as if reality's veil has been torn asunder, to reveal a three-dimensional blueprint detailing the Platonic ideal of, say, a strip light, thermostat, or ceiling rose. Perfect Home is also subtly autobiographical. J Alfred Prufrock, in TS Eliot's poem, 'measured out [his] life with coffee spoons'; Suh quantifies his existence with light switches, plug sockets, and the like.
While he's best known for these fabric edifices, Suh also produces rubbings of buildings. In 2013, he began making a full-size, 3D facsimile of his family's 'hanok' (a traditional Korean dwelling) by covering it with mulberry paper and rubbing every inch of its surface with graphite to record the varying textures of, say, speckled brick or wood-grain. With the sheets mounted on an aluminium frame, the finished piece, completed almost a decade later, appears like a house for an enormous spirit.
Not everything in the exhibition is so evocative. Suh's works on paper incorporating colourful thread, on display, here, near his installations, can feel uptight and second-tier; his stodgy videos, screened at one end of the gallery, left me indifferent. But his yearning, spectral installations, addressing memory, are both formally ingenious and emotionally affecting.