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Time Out
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Reflecting on themes of memory, migration and the home, South Korean conceptual artist Do Ho Suh is internationally renowned for his vast fabric sculptures and meticulous architectural installations. This year, he's finally presenting a major exhibition at Tate Modern, in the city he currently lives, showcasing three decades of his work including brand-new, site-specific pieces. The exhibition begins with Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), a full-scale rendering of Suh's childhood hanok house in Korea, made of delicate off-white paper. Created through traditional rubbing techniques, the imprint of every surface, from the walls, floors, and fixtures, is captured in the material. This isn't simply a house – it's a lived experience, transposed onto graphite and fibre. The structure feels both solid and spectral, as if memory itself had drifted into the gallery and taken form. As the exhibition progresses, Suh leans further into his exploration of the spaces we carry within us. In Nest/s (2025), visitors walk through a corridor of interconnected translucent 'rooms' in vivid colours, where every detail, from light switches to radiators, is precisely rendered. Suh allows the viewer to activate the work through their movement, transforming it into a shifting, porous membrane. This structure leads to Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a life-size outline of Suh's current home in the UK, filled with domestic fixtures from the many places he has lived. Colour-coded and installed at their original heights, these familiar objects form a layered, disorienting map of Suh's past, becoming a quiet, spatial autobiography. Suh suggests that the idea of a perfect home is an illusion Suh is fascinated by graphs, mapping, ordering and measuring to distill ideas. His Bridge Project takes the themes present in the interior installations and magnifies them onto a global scale. The work imagines a bridge, connecting the cities he's lived in (Seoul, New York and London) and points to its midpoint in the Arctic Ocean: a place that is claimed by no one yet threatened by all, somewhere charged with climate anxiety, colonial histories and statelessness. In this speculative space, Suh suggests that the idea of a perfect home is itself an illusion. The void becomes a space of resistance, against fixed borders, national identities and the politics of belonging. Each element of the exhibition, from the drawings to the installations and films, is individually compelling. But the space itself feels compressed; the works are densely arranged and you can't help but feel that each piece would benefit from more room to breathe. As it stands, the intimacy of Suh's practice risks being overwhelmed by the tightness of the display. That said, his message is clear. In an age defined by global migration and shifting borders, the home is a charged space: at once personal and political, defining a threshold between private and public, past and present. His intricately rendered fabric and paper reconstructions of the houses he's inhabited go beyond architectural replication: they chart emotion, displacement and adaptation, and they do so beautifully.
CNN
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
South Korea's unique housing culture has inspired a major new exhibition
There is something peculiar about entering a building only to be greeted by another one inside it, so it takes a moment to adjust upon arriving on the second floor of London's prestigious Tate Modern art gallery. Directly in front of the entryway is a 1:1 scale facsimile of Do Ho Suh's childhood home in Seoul, which he wrapped in mulberry paper and carefully traced in graphite to produce an intricate rubbing of the exterior. It is just one of many versions of home envisioned by the Korean artist over the past 30 years. Running at Tate Modern through to October, 'Walk the House' is Suh's largest solo institutional show to date in the UK, where he has been based since 2016. Before that, he lived in the US, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University in the 1990s. The exhibition's name stems from an expression used in the context of the 'hanok,' a traditional Korean house that can be taken down and reassembled elsewhere, thanks to its construction and lightweight materials. The buildings have become rarer over time, because of urbanization, war and occupation, which led to the destruction of many traditional homes in the country. Suh's own childhood home was an outlier amid Seoul's changing cityscape during the 1970s, which underwent rapid development after the Korean War left the city in ruins. It spurred the artist's ongoing preoccupations with home as both a physical space that could be dissolved and reanimated, but also a psychological construct that can reflect memory and identity. Among the show's exhibits are embroidered artworks, architectural models in various materials and scales, and film works involving complex 3D techniques. The detailed outlines picked up in Suh's hanok rubbing are echoed in two closely related large-scale pieces on display for the first time, both of which visitors can walk inside. 'Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul' (2024) takes various 3D fixtures and fittings from homes Suh has lived in around the world and maps them onto a tent-like model of his London apartment. 'Nest/s' (2024) is a pastel-hued tunnel, again based on different places he has called home, this time splicing together incongruous hallways — an environment that holds symbolic meaning for the artist. 'I think that the experience of cultural displacement helped me to see these in-between spaces, the space that connects places. That journey lets me focus on transitional spaces, like corridors, staircases, entrances,' Suh told CNN at the show's opening. The exhibition also features 'Staircase' (2016), a 3D structure that was subsequently collapsed into a red, sinewy 2D tangle. 'I think in general we tend to focus on destinations, but these bridges that connect those destinations, often we neglect them, but actually we spend most of our time in this transitional stage,' Suh said. There's a translucent quality to much of the work on display. Fine, gauzy textiles are used directly within many of the pieces, as well as in the form of a subtle room divider — the closest thing to an internal wall in the main space. 'For the first time since 2016, the galleries of the exhibition will have all their walls taken down in order to accommodate the multiple large-scale works that will be materialized within them, as well as the multiple times and spaces that those works carry,' said Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator for international art at Tate Modern, who co-curated the show with Nabila Abdel Nabi, senior curator of international art at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. 'In doing so, the open layout will form not a linear passage or narrative, but instead encourage visitors to meander, return, loop back, evoking an experience closer to the function of memory itself.' Suh's emphasis on spatial interventions poses creative challenges for curators as well as the institutions that hold these works. One such example is 'Staircase-III' (2010), acquired by the Tate back in 2011, which often needs to be adapted to wherever it is shown by measuring new panels to fit each space. 'I wanted to disturb the habitual experience of (encountering) an artwork in a museum,' said Suh by way of explanation. Akhmadeeva added that the approach challenged the 'idea of permanence — of the work and of the space around it.' Removing the gallery walls also reflects Suh's interest in peeling environments back to their foundations. 'It's just the bare space that the architects originally conceived,' he said. Suh's work often focuses on spatial experiences rather than material goods because, just like the rooms and buildings we inhabit, an empty space behaves like a 'vessel' for memories, he explained. 'Over the years and the time that you've spent in the space, you project your own experience and energy onto it, and then it becomes a memory.' The artist does occasionally focus on ornaments and furnishings, however, as seen in his monumental film, 'Robin Hood Gardens' (named after the East London housing estate it captures), which used photogrammetry to stitch together drone footage taken inside the council building awaiting demolition. It marked a rare instance of Suh documenting both residents and their belongings. The film illustrates the subtle politics of Suh's practice. 'Often in my case, the color and the craftsmanship and the beauty in my work distract from the political undertone of it,' he said. Issues such as privacy, security, and access to space are intimately connected to class and public policy, but his commentary is covered in a soft veil of fabric or the gentle rub of graphite. The latter is also used in 'Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater' (2012), which reflects on the deadly Gwangju Uprising of 1980. The artwork resembles the shell of a room that is unravelled to form a flat, vertical structure, like a deconstructed box. It is based on a rubbing that was taken by Suh and his assistants while blindfolded — a nod to the censorship of the military's violent response and its absence from South Korean collective memory. The exhibition is bookended by pieces that address sociopolitical questions. 'Bridge Project' (1999) explores land ownership among other issues, while 'Public Figures' (2025), an evolution of a piece Suh made for the Venice Biennale in 2001, is a subverted monument featuring an empty plinth, directing focus to the many miniature figurines upholding it. For Suh, it was intended to address Korea's histories of both oppression and resilience. While these two exhibits may feel distinct, for Suh, all of his work interrogates the boundaries between personal and public space, and the conditions that force transience or enable permanence. The tension between public and private was thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced people to spend most of their time indoors. Although Suh 'scrutinized' all corners of his home during this time, the lockdowns didn't materialize in his practice in the way one might expect. Instead, it elicited a more tender reflection on what is often the making of a home: people. It explains why, among the substantial, often colorful structures in the exhibition, there are two small tunics made for (and with) his two young daughters, adorned with pockets holding their most cherished belongings, such as crayons and toys. 'As a parent, it was quite a vulnerable situation. Other families, I cannot speak for them, but it really helped us to be together,' said Suh.
CNN
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
South Korea's unique housing culture has inspired a major new exhibition
There is something peculiar about entering a building only to be greeted by another one inside it, so it takes a moment to adjust upon arriving on the second floor of London's prestigious Tate Modern art gallery. Directly in front of the entryway is a 1:1 scale facsimile of Do Ho Suh's childhood home in Seoul, which he wrapped in mulberry paper and carefully traced in graphite to produce an intricate rubbing of the exterior. It is just one of many versions of home envisioned by the Korean artist over the past 30 years. Running at Tate Modern through to October, 'Walk the House' is Suh's largest solo institutional show to date in the UK, where he has been based since 2016. Before that, he lived in the US, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University in the 1990s. The exhibition's name stems from an expression used in the context of the 'hanok,' a traditional Korean house that can be taken down and reassembled elsewhere, thanks to its construction and lightweight materials. The buildings have become rarer over time, because of urbanization, war and occupation, which led to the destruction of many traditional homes in the country. Suh's own childhood home was an outlier amid Seoul's changing cityscape during the 1970s, which underwent rapid development after the Korean War left the city in ruins. It spurred the artist's ongoing preoccupations with home as both a physical space that could be dissolved and reanimated, but also a psychological construct that can reflect memory and identity. Among the show's exhibits are embroidered artworks, architectural models in various materials and scales, and film works involving complex 3D techniques. The detailed outlines picked up in Suh's hanok rubbing are echoed in two closely related large-scale pieces on display for the first time, both of which visitors can walk inside. 'Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul' (2024) takes various 3D fixtures and fittings from homes Suh has lived in around the world and maps them onto a tent-like model of his London apartment. 'Nest/s' (2024) is a pastel-hued tunnel, again based on different places he has called home, this time splicing together incongruous hallways — an environment that holds symbolic meaning for the artist. 'I think that the experience of cultural displacement helped me to see these in-between spaces, the space that connects places. That journey lets me focus on transitional spaces, like corridors, staircases, entrances,' Suh told CNN at the show's opening. The exhibition also features 'Staircase' (2016), a 3D structure that was subsequently collapsed into a red, sinewy 2D tangle. 'I think in general we tend to focus on destinations, but these bridges that connect those destinations, often we neglect them, but actually we spend most of our time in this transitional stage,' Suh said. There's a translucent quality to much of the work on display. Fine, gauzy textiles are used directly within many of the pieces, as well as in the form of a subtle room divider — the closest thing to an internal wall in the main space. 'For the first time since 2016, the galleries of the exhibition will have all their walls taken down in order to accommodate the multiple large-scale works that will be materialized within them, as well as the multiple times and spaces that those works carry,' said Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator for international art at Tate Modern, who co-curated the show with Nabila Abdel Nabi, senior curator of international art at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. 'In doing so, the open layout will form not a linear passage or narrative, but instead encourage visitors to meander, return, loop back, evoking an experience closer to the function of memory itself.' Suh's emphasis on spatial interventions poses creative challenges for curators as well as the institutions that hold these works. One such example is 'Staircase-III' (2010), acquired by the Tate back in 2011, which often needs to be adapted to wherever it is shown by measuring new panels to fit each space. 'I wanted to disturb the habitual experience of (encountering) an artwork in a museum,' said Suh by way of explanation. Akhmadeeva added that the approach challenged the 'idea of permanence — of the work and of the space around it.' Removing the gallery walls also reflects Suh's interest in peeling environments back to their foundations. 'It's just the bare space that the architects originally conceived,' he said. Suh's work often focuses on spatial experiences rather than material goods because, just like the rooms and buildings we inhabit, an empty space behaves like a 'vessel' for memories, he explained. 'Over the years and the time that you've spent in the space, you project your own experience and energy onto it, and then it becomes a memory.' The artist does occasionally focus on ornaments and furnishings, however, as seen in his monumental film, 'Robin Hood Gardens' (named after the East London housing estate it captures), which used photogrammetry to stitch together drone footage taken inside the council building awaiting demolition. It marked a rare instance of Suh documenting both residents and their belongings. The film illustrates the subtle politics of Suh's practice. 'Often in my case, the color and the craftsmanship and the beauty in my work distract from the political undertone of it,' he said. Issues such as privacy, security, and access to space are intimately connected to class and public policy, but his commentary is covered in a soft veil of fabric or the gentle rub of graphite. The latter is also used in 'Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater' (2012), which reflects on the deadly Gwangju Uprising of 1980. The artwork resembles the shell of a room that is unravelled to form a flat, vertical structure, like a deconstructed box. It is based on a rubbing that was taken by Suh and his assistants while blindfolded — a nod to the censorship of the military's violent response and its absence from South Korean collective memory. The exhibition is bookended by pieces that address sociopolitical questions. 'Bridge Project' (1999) explores land ownership among other issues, while 'Public Figures' (2025), an evolution of a piece Suh made for the Venice Biennale in 2001, is a subverted monument featuring an empty plinth, directing focus to the many miniature figurines upholding it. For Suh, it was intended to address Korea's histories of both oppression and resilience. While these two exhibits may feel distinct, for Suh, all of his work interrogates the boundaries between personal and public space, and the conditions that force transience or enable permanence. The tension between public and private was thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced people to spend most of their time indoors. Although Suh 'scrutinized' all corners of his home during this time, the lockdowns didn't materialize in his practice in the way one might expect. Instead, it elicited a more tender reflection on what is often the making of a home: people. It explains why, among the substantial, often colorful structures in the exhibition, there are two small tunics made for (and with) his two young daughters, adorned with pockets holding their most cherished belongings, such as crayons and toys. 'As a parent, it was quite a vulnerable situation. Other families, I cannot speak for them, but it really helped us to be together,' said Suh.
Telegraph
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, Tate Modern: ‘Impossible' architecture remade on a human scale
'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.
