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"The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House" is currently on display at Tate Modern

In the cathedral-like stillness of Tate Modern’s galleries, Do Ho Suh: Walk the House opens not with grand gestures, but with whispers—delicate echoes of memory, space, and time suspended in fabric. This long-awaited solo exhibition, Suh’s first in London in over twenty years, is more than a retrospective. It is an act of remembering—intimate, meticulous, and tenderly architectural.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024 
Polyester, stainless steel ; 410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm
Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su
© Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh Nest/s, 2024
Polyester, stainless steel ; 410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm
Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su
© Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh
Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024
Polyester, stainless steel ; 455 x 575 x 1237 cm
Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro.
Photography by Jeon Taeg Su
© Do Ho Suh

Suh’s work defies categorization. It sits somewhere between sculpture and architecture,  memory and material. Using semi-transparent polyester fabric in shades of pink, blue, green, and red, he recreates the places he has called home: a childhood house in Seoul, cramped apartments in New York, rented flats in London. Every door handle, every faucet, every light switch is present—stitched with astonishing fidelity into gauzy forms that float in the gallery air like lucid dreams.

At the center of the exhibition is Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a poetic conflation of six different residences. It is a home that never existed, and yet one that feels instantly familiar. Visitors walk through doorways into overlapping geographies of memory, across continents and decades, all held together by thread and transparency. The seams are literal, and metaphorical: this is how lives are stitched together when permanence is elusive.

Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home, 2024 (Detail). Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su

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Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro.  Creation supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Suh has an uncanny ability to elevate the mundane into the profound. A radiator. A doorbell. The invisible nicks and grooves of a lived-in corner. These are the things we forget to remember—until he renders them in translucent fabric, and we see them anew. The installations are ghostlike, yet never eerie. They carry the warmth of human habitation, the accumulated presence of absence. It’s not only about the form—it’s about the memory encoded in that form. The way a hallway feels different in winter. The squeak of a floorboard you knew to avoid. These are the textures Suh reweaves into architecture. In these quiet sculptures, everyday life becomes reverent.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024
Polyester, stainless steel
410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm
Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro.
Photography by Jeon Taeg Su
© Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013-2022, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Repurposing supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013-2022 (detail). Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia.
Photography by Sebastian Mrugalski
Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro.
© Do Ho Suh.

Not all of Suh’s work in this exhibition relies on architectural form. His Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022) is a deeply tactile, devotional act. Here, Suh uses colored pencil and paper to record every inch of his former homes by hand-rubbing the surfaces—a laborious process that yields fragile, paper skin-like impressions of walls, ceilings, and moldings.

This series is less about reconstruction and more about intimacy. The rubbings are traces of touch, of goodbye, of holding on. Each mark is a love letter to the spaces that made him. As Suh himself has said, “We bring our memories with us when we move. And my memories inhabit the architectural pieces that I create, which are physical, but also psychological and metaphorical.”

Through this lens, his work becomes an embodied form of memory—a way to stay connected to places long gone. As a Korean-born artist living in the West, Suh’s work has always grappled with ideas of displacement and migration. But rather than foregrounding trauma, Walk the House offers space for reflection, empathy, and even solace. The fabric homes are portable, pliable, and porous—homes that can travel, adapt, unfold. They speak to the modern condition of never fully arriving, of constantly translating oneself into new contexts. Yet rather than mourn this, Suh elevates it. His work suggests that home is not a fixed address, but a fluid constellation of moments, details, and sensations that we carry with us.

Do Ho Suh, Home Within Home (1/9 Scale) 2025, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

This makes the exhibition especially resonant today, in an era marked by dislocation—whether through globalization, crisis, or choice. Suh’s installations invite viewers to ask: What does home feel like? What have I brought with me, and what have I left behind?

The immersive nature of the exhibition further collapses boundaries between viewer and artwork. One doesn’t simply observe Suh’s spaces; one inhabits them. To move through a corridor of red gauze or brush against a filmy kitchen sink is to feel briefly inside someone else’s skin. It is a rare kind of empathy that Suh cultivates—one grounded in spatial memory rather than spectacle.

Do Ho Suh, My Homes, 2010, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London, Victoria Miro and STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Tate Modern’s Walk the House is more than a display of technical mastery (though Suh’s precision is awe-inspiring). It is a deeply emotional, almost meditative journey through the architecture of memory. The light filtering through fabric walls casts soft shadows that move as you do. The silence in these rooms is not empty—it is filled with the echo of footsteps long passed.

There is a quiet generosity to Suh’s work. Though rooted in his biography, it makes space for ours. We are invited not just to look, but to inhabit—to step inside someone else’s memory, and find our own reflection there. In doing so, Suh collapses the distance between artist and viewer, past and present, personal and universal.

Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is at Tate Modern from 1 May to 19 October