Do Ho Suh review — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home

Times

29-04-2025

An enticing light switch. A pleasing plug socket. A door handle deserving of a turn. Do Ho Suh's fixtures and appliances are meticulously detailed and beautifully vibrant, the domestic (and, dare I say, more dazzling) version of Damien Hirst's dots and pills. At Tate Modern, the great Korean artist has fashioned hundreds from colour-coded fabric according to the places he's inhabited, and installed them on four transparent panels modelled on his present London abode. The effect is at once playful and haunting, a ghostly meeting of places and time zones that poses questions about the meaning of home.
Which is what — a place, a feeling, an idea? Such questions echo around this exquisite exhibition, which surveys Suh's rich and varied practice over the past 30 years. Born in Seoul in 1962, he studied art for a decade before moving to the US in 1991, continuing his studies and eventually relocating to London in 2010. The show borrows its name from an old expression he heard the carpenters constructing his childhood home use when he was a boy. The building was a traditional Korean timber house with a tiled roof known as a hanok, which could be taken to pieces and put back together again in a new spot — a process of 'walking the house'.
Suh has walked it right into the gallery space — or at least a life-sized version of it, made from mulberry paper, which he previously wrapped around the house and rubbed over with graphite to capture the sometimes smooth, sometimes nubby textures of stone, glass, wood. It reappears in delicate threaded drawings that unspool in rainbow colours across vast sheets of cotton paper: hovering in mid-air, tethered like a parachute to a person running; sprouting a pair of legs and hurrying along independently.
For the most part, it's a one-room show, with an elegant mix of works on paper, videos and large-scale installations that are as bright and cheery as they are profound. At one end, a lengthy film projected onto a big screen explores the impact of gentrification on the residents of a housing estate destined for demolition in east London. At the centre, a shimmering polychrome passageway configured from different rooms the artist has spent time in calls out for children to charge through it like a playground.
Is there such a thing as the perfect home? Bridge Project, which Suh began in 1999, an epilogue of sorts, imagines a hanok perched in the middle of a bridge connecting the three cities in his life, suspended tantalisingly above the ocean. A floating home.
★★★★☆
The exhibition runs May 1 to Oct 19,