Korean artist Do Ho Suh: ‘Space is just a vessel for containing our memories'

Telegraph

26-04-2025

'As soon as we're born,' says Do Ho Suh, 'without knowing it, we're influenced by the architecture and the objects that we're surrounded by.' The Korean artist has taken a break from installing Walk the House, a two-decade survey of his work at Tate Modern, to explain to me the ideas that underpin his delicate, apparition-like installations. These huge, yet seemingly weightless, hanging works – fashioned from gauzy, coloured polyester or paper – recreate, at one-to-one scale, the architecture of some of the many places Suh has called home, in Korea, the US and elsewhere.
Now 62, Suh has something of the monk about him: with shaven head and round-rimmed glasses, he is the kind of unassuming character one could imagine contemplating the essence of things in a sparsely furnished study, or else embarking on an itinerant life, in which home is nowhere and everywhere. It's certainly an image that fits with his sculptures, which seem to embody a philosophical paradox. On the one hand, in their meticulous rendering of every cornice and architrave, every skirting board and doorknob, light switch, plug socket, window frame, sconce, shelf, hinge and air conditioning, they feel like a love letter to the concrete reality of ­everyday life. On the other, they are fearfully fragile, barely there at all: like a memory that has taken on just enough tangible form to come back from the past. No wonder they're often described as 'ghosts'.
In this way, for more than 20 years, Suh has given shape to how we relate ourselves to past and ­present – both as individuals and as a society – while reflecting on how place and memory define us. That aspect of remembrance has a strong cultural root; when Suh was growing up in 1970s South Korea, then still under military rule and in the throes of rapid industrialisation and modernisation, his family home was unusual. While the tower blocks were going up all around them, his parents – artists and intellectuals active in the movement to ­preserve Korean culture – built their own trad­itional hanok house, employing craftsmen who still knew the old techniques.
'I was fortunate enough to witness the entire process of construction of the building,' Suh tells me. 'Of my generation, I would have probably been one of very few people who saw it.'
At the Tate, he'll also be showing one of the works from his ­Rubbing/Loving series, a recreation of that childhood hanok constructed entirely from paper, in which the actual building was wrapped, and each timber, beam and panel painstakingly rubbed over with graphite to capture the grain of the wood and the house's carvings. One of a group of similar paper-rubbing works, it's a spectral thing, but compared with the translucent, textile sculptures, it's loaded with a more intimate, tactile sense of something of value being preserved. Started in 2013, it was not shown until 2022.
Suh says that when, in the mid-1990s, the political crisis had escalated between North and South Korea, 'I was already living in America... we only found out later quite how dire the situation was. I had a great fear of losing the house completely by ­bombing, because we were on the verge of war. On top of that, my parents were getting older. It was those feelings that gave me the motivation to do the rubbing pieces.'
The play between permanence and transience is fundamental to the different styles of buildings that have ended up in Suh's work, from the Korean hanok to the New York City apartment where Suh lived for 20 years, until 2016.
'With Asian architecture,' he says, 'especially Korean architecture, the buildings are quite permeable. There are no solid walls. You have columns, and then in between, the walls are made from sliding screens, which can be reconfigured or removed according to the season of the year, or throughout the day. So the [distinction] between inside and outside is a bit ambiguous.'
By contrast, the Western trad­itions of architecture favour a much more 'man-made' environment, he suggests. 'The room is air-conditioned [in summer], or heated, when outside is freezing cold. That type of clear distinction in Western architecture versus this ambiguity in Asian architecture was something I found interesting from the beginning.'
From the permeability of trad­itional Asian architecture, Suh took his cue to make semi-transparent recreations of buildings originally made from brick and concrete. Through the strange effect that their transparency produces, Suh's gauzy works somehow manage to mess with one's sense of time and place. At Tate Modern, he will be showing the recently completed Nest/s, a huge fabric work made up of a sequence of changing architectural sections, arranged so that each one merges into the next, together forming a kind of broad corridor through which the viewer can walk.
But each segment – based on actual buildings the artist has occupied in the past – also has a door or a window to the 'outside': European-style French windows in glowing canary yellow; anonymous fire doors in cherry red; the sliding screens and shutters of a Korean house in mint green. There's nothing to see through these apertures, of course, except for the sight of other gallery-goers, firmly in the here and now.
And yet, Nest/s manages to tele­scope together the many places and moments through which a human life has been lived. Such hard-and-fast distinctions as 'now' and 'then'' need questioning, Suh says. 'It's become a cliché that we're always told that we should be 'living in the moment'. But I think that maybe even 99 per cent of our thoughts are of the past,' he explains. 'I live in London, so I say that London is my home, but in my head, I still live in Seoul and New York as well. So the 'nests' are all overlapping, and some of them are completely encapsulated by the other spaces.'
It's perhaps not surprising to learn that Suh has a taste for ­metaphysics. The artist who once wanted to study marine biology (though, he recalls, the entrance exams proved impossibly hard) now says that if he could have his life over again, he would have wanted to be a theoretical physicist, 'to study where time started', he says, since 'space and time don't really exist. They're concepts we've created because we move constantly, so time is a trace of our movement, in a way, and then space is a vessel that our memories are contained in.'
Suh's dedication to drawing the past into the present might well make him visual art's answer to Marcel Proust.
Perhaps inevitably, the experience of migration and living abroad have also played their part in shaping Suh's work; the initial move away from Korea to the US in the early 1990s, to study first at the hip US Rhode Island School of Design, and then at Yale, came out of a desire to put some distance between his work and the more traditional, historically-minded currents that dominated the Korean art scene of the time. That and the fact that his father was by then an influential painter in his own right, as well as a professor at Seoul National University where Do Ho had spent much of the 1980s studying painting. 'I loved having a famous artist as a father,' Suh says now, 'but I started to notice that everything I did was somehow associated with his legacy.'
Suh's history of globetrotting might appear to fit the archetype of the international artist, but rather than coming up with a kind of blandly globalised aesthetic, or then again, the opposite sort of art, more obsessed with the particulars of cultural identity, Suh instead taps into a more universal sense of everyday differences. He's less attuned to some loud polemic about migration or multiculturalism than to an intuition of what it means to be at home, wherever you are.
But, alongside his installations focused on the home and its architecture, Suh has also pursued a line of works that comment on the more collective, nationalistic identity of South Korea; one fêted early piece was the sinister Some/One (2001), a darkly glittering robe-like shape, sleeves outstretched, composed entirely of military dog-tags, which cascade down and outwards across the ­surrounding floor. At the Tate, he'll be showing a version of ­Public ­Figures (1998), a towering but empty classical plinth held aloft by hundreds of little striding men and women. It's an ironic comment on conformity and anonymity, yet ambiguous in its celebration of ­collective endeavour, which may not need strong leaders or political ideologies to drive it on.
When I ask Suh if he would ever want to go back to live in South Korea, he responds by talking instead about the making of ­Rubbing/Loving. Maybe retrieving this pale imprint of his childhood home is enough of an imaginative return. After all, his life is now in London, with his British wife and their two young daughters, who, he laughs, are suddenly more interested in all things Korean now that K-Pop and Korean drama have become global fashions.
Later, though, Suh is scribbling on a notepad, explaining to me how the Chinese ideograms for 'time' and 'space' and 'human being' all incorporate the character for the idea of 'between'. It's an effort, since different languages frame concepts in ways that don't perfectly align.
'The thing is,' he says, 'I never paid attention to how language is a sort of material, like an object, until I left Korea. The Korean lang­uage was 'transparent' when I was living there, like the concept of home, and I didn't pay attention to it. But now it's something I'm very sensitive to.' In other words, home, as many migrants discover, isn't always somewhere you can go back to, even if you wanted to.