In this beautiful, thought-provoking exhibition, Korean artist Do Ho Suh explores the concept of home, based on dwellings he has lived in in three cities – Seoul, New York, and London. By physically recreating aspects of these houses and apartments through rubbing and stitching, Suh explores the relationship between architecture, the body, and memory. What spaces and times do we carry with us, and how do they change as we move through the world?
As an army brat who lived on various military bases in Germany when I was a child, I can relate to this. For me, home was not a fixed place but a situation – essentially wherever my parents were. My mum also had a restlessness about her – she would periodically rearrange all the furniture in the house, so nothing ever stayed where it was for very long.
Even when my dad retired from the army and we moved back the the UK and bought a house, it never really felt like home. It wasn’t until I came to London to go to university that I started to feel I had found somewhere that I belonged. I still moved around the capital and travelled abroad a lot, but now, after 34 years at the same address, this is where I call home. But I digress…
Paper rubbing
Suh’s childhood home – a traditional Korean house known as a hanok – occurs repeatedly throughout the exhibition. The most dominant manifestation is the life-size re-creation he made by covering the entire house in paper and rubbing it with graphite. It can’t reproduce every detail accurately, but as Suh explains: ‘It’s more about capturing enough visual and physical information to evoke a sense of the space as I experienced it.”
The hanok also appears in some of his large-scale thread paintings, and in the 3D-printed Home Within Home, where it has been merged into a block of rented apartments where Suh lived in the US.
Before moving from New York to London in 2016, Suh did some rubbings of the fittings in his apartment. Displayed in their original packaging, they are like a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, snappily titled Rubbing/Loving Project: Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA.
Knobs and knockers
Fittings again take a starring role in two other large-scale installations, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul and Nest/s. Here Suh turns to the traditional Korean technique of jogakbo, a style of patchwork used to create wrapping cloths from leftover fabric scraps. The details are fantastic, from shower heads and fire extinguishers to fuse boxes and door knobs.
Bridge Project
The second part of the exhibition is about Suh’s speculative Bridge Project. The artist imagines his “perfect home” being at the centre of a bridge connecting Seoul, New York, and London – the three key cities in his life. The point which is equidistant from all three cities lies in the Arctic Ocean, 700km from the nearest coastline.
The idea is impossible, but Suh uses the idea to explore the issues of architecture, clothing, philosophy, politics, ecology, and biology around it.
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House runs at Tate Modern until 19 October 2025.
