Cover Do Ho Suh’s exhibition is being showcased at Tate Modern London (Artist’s portrait by Gautier Deblonde © Gautier Deblonde, all rights reserved DACS 2024)
Do Ho Suh’s exhibition is being showcased at Tate Modern London (Artist’s portrait by Gautier Deblonde © Gautier Deblonde, all rights reserved DACS 2024)
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Explore South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s exhibition at Tate Modern where he challenges the conventional notion of home through his innovative installations and sculptures
Internationally renowned South Korean artist Do Ho Suh is known for his work in sculpture, installation and drawing. With degrees in painting from Seoul National University and Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in sculpture from Yale and three decades of practice, Suh is famed for pushing the boundaries of what we conventionally understand as space.
Now, Tate Modern presents a landmark exhibition of his works, titled The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, marking his first major solo showing in London for a generation. The artist invites visitors to explore his large-scale installations, sculptures, videos and drawings, posing questions about home, memory and how time and space are inseparable. He says, “The space I am interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical and psychological one. For me, ‘space’ is that which encompasses everything.”
The show also signifies the breadth of Suh’s work beyond beautifully coloured translucent fabric houses. In this interview with Tatler, Suh reveals that he didn’t choose colours because they are beautiful but because they are useful for colour coding.
Speaking about the exhibition, Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator at Tate Modern, says, “We emphasise that this exhibition is not a retrospective. Do Ho often talks about how he doesn’t align with the idea of the retrospective or survey exhibition because he’s not rooted in linear time. His way of thinking through his work is anchored in cycles of time and the idea of time as cyclical.”
I’m sitting with Suh in his small studio in East London that he uses personally with his two daughters, very close to his home. He has a larger studio that he works in with his team but chose this one for the interview. I have seen his works in Seoul and Venice a few times, but this is the first time I sat down with him. Having seen his Tate Modern show, I am enchanted by his interpretation of time and space. I also want to know how growing up in Korea has impacted his work.
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Above Do Ho Suh’s “Nests”, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh’s “Nests”, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh
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Suh explains this show is only possible here and now. He says, “The things I have experienced and thought about while living and working in Seoul, New York and London are incorporated into this exhibition. At the moment, the inseparable entanglement of time and space is a big theme for me. So are continuity and discontinuity. That’s why in my new work, Nest/s 2024, I overlapped the houses that I have lived in different cities and regions. Even if I see something now in London, the experiences and memories I had in Seoul and New York act as an invisible filter for me.” He believes that one space can often carry the memory of other spaces.
Many people think his work comes from a very deeply personal place. “That's the most common misconception I get. I question whether such a thing as a truly personal place exists. The home I live in has been lived in by countless people before me, and the memories of others are woven together, so it is not my home, it is ‘our home’.“
“Home is a space within a larger community of destiny, and I am a passer-by.” Suh explains that from the nomadic hunting era to agricultural times, settling down in one place has come to signify authority in Western civilisation. People became obsessed with permanence, enforcing the idea that without a home, we have no roots. People with power and money built huge castles. “A house or castle is immovable real estate, but I make that space movable by using a lightweight, foldable material, a thin fabric. I attempt to turn the existing system upside down.” It is fascinating that his seemingly ephemeral and craft-led work is based on such a radical approach.
Above Do Ho Suh’s “My Homes”, 2010. Photography by Hyunsoo Kim. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London, Victoria Miro and Singapore Tyler Prin © Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh’s “My Homes”, 2010. Photography by Hyunsoo Kim. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London, Victoria Miro and Singapore Tyler Prin © Do Ho Suh
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The exhibition’s title, Walk the House, is aptly named to illustrate his concept. It is drawn from an old Korean expression Suh heard as a child in Seoul from a master artisan who was building a traditional Korean house, hanok—a timber house that could be disassembled, transported and reassembled at a new site, a process imagined as “walking the house”.
“In contrast to the West, the East has a fluid and holistic approach”, he says. “Even in the building, I enjoyed the ambiguity and flexibility of not distinguishing between inside and outside, emphasising feng shui, layout and harmony with nature.”
When Suh was a young boy in Seoul in the 1970s, his father decided to build a family home based on a hanok. He tracked down traditional artisans who possessed the knowledge and skills to construct this kind of houses. Suh visited the building site almost daily as the house started to take shape. “I had a chance to closely interact with artisans, and as I grew up, I realised that this experience had an indelible impact on me. Leaving home and Korea made me think about the idea of home. The absence of home made me think about the concept of home.”
Above Do Ho Suh, “Perfect Home”, 2024 (Detail). Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. Courtesy of the artist. © Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh, “Perfect Home”, 2024 (Detail). Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. Courtesy of the artist. © Do Ho Suh
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His training in ink painting in Korea also strongly influenced how he perceives being an artist. The instantaneous embedding of ink into absorbent paper fibres limits the painter’s control of the image. “When you remove your brush from the paper, ink continues to permeate paper. It is difficult to define whether it is my work or a coincidence.” He rejects the traditional notion of an artist as conceived in the Western world. “In the West, there is a notion that the artist is a genius. The work of an artist is considered a divine thing touched by a genius. I try hard to break that. Very little of my work is done by myself. It’s all collaborative and that’s part of my reaction to the autocratic idea of authorship.”
His views of repressive authority is reflected in Public Figures outside the exhibition entrance. A monolithic stone plinth is empty but is supported by several hundred small 3D-printed nylon figures. Since it was first made in 1998, he has frequently returned to the idea of a public monument remade by individuals working together to unseat a celebration of patriarchal authority. Guests can watch a video of these small figures moving the plinth around Tate Modern.
Regarding the design of the space, curator Akhmadeeva says, “For the first time since 2016 when these galleries and the Blavatnik Building opened, we have taken out all the walls not only to accommodate the architecture Suh has created but also to enable visitors to move through and return to works. The layout works to echo the workings of memory, where we as visitors might be located in one space but might somehow constantly return to and keep with us the spaces we encountered previously.”
Above Do Ho Suh, “Rubbing Loving Project Seoul Home”, 2013-2022. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia© Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh, “Rubbing Loving Project Seoul Home”, 2013-2022. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia© Do Ho Suh
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Perfect Home is an outline of the artist’s present home in London filled with sewn architectural features from domestic spaces in which he and his family have previously lived, such as doorknobs, light switches and electrical sockets. “I'm not good at creating forms that don’t exist in the world, like an abstract painter. I always have my feet on the ground. From the moment we are born, we are forced to live a life that is dictated by conditions that we cannot choose. As an artist, I wish to work without constraints, but I cannot escape the constraints I am given, and architectural space, what I call a site, is one of them. The doorknobs and light switches in Perfect Home are important because they are the only things that people actually touch in this big space. We wake up and go through the same routines every day, touching them dozens, hundreds of times, and their positions shape our behaviour and patterns.”
Major installations such as Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013-22)—created through the labour-intensive process of rubbing the surfaces of buildings with graphite or coloured pencil—reflect on how spaces can bear witness to both personal and collective memory. In the newly reconfigured Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012), rubbing becomes a way to reflect on the violent aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980, asking what memories spaces might carry against the grain of official histories.
Two of Suh’s video works–Robin Hood Gardens, Woolmore Street, London E14 0HG (2018) and Dong In Apartments (2022)–address the rapidly changing architectural fabric of cities and consider the relationship between a building and a home, using advanced technology and processes such as photogrammetry—the stitching together of images to produce a digital model of the physical world—and fly-through camera techniques. The exhibition culminates in a space dedicated to Suh’s ongoing Bridge Project—an interrogation of an impossible ‘perfect home’. Created in collaboration with specialists in architecture, engineering, anthropology and biology, it grapples with how an imagined, hypothetical set of structures intersect with real-world social, political and ecological issues.
I tell him how walking through the houses he has lived in brought me memories of my homes and how they shaped me. There were no roaring political messages, which I often find a bit exhausting. “I’m glad you felt that way,” he says cheerily. “My previous work titled Conduit reflects how I see the role of an artist. I want to provide a new lens through which to view the world. I’ve believed since I was a student that if I tell my personal story truly honestly, there will be something that people can relate to. I don't try to [weave in] a big political agenda. Instead, I want people to create their own stories through my work.”
