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Do Ho Suh Exhibition "Walk the House" at at the Tate Modern

Do Ho Suh, a London-based South Korean artist, is currently exhibiting at the Tate Modern in the United Kingdom. The exhibition titled Walk the House has gone live from 1st May 2025 to 26th October 2025. Artist Suh is known for exploring the themes between architecture, space, memories, and the body; his most prominent work is perhaps his large-scale fabric installations. In addition to the drawings and videos on display, a particularly interesting aspect of his work - the theme of architecture, which has been a key reference for Suh since the 1990s can also be viewed in this medium-sized exhibition. According to Suh,

“The space I’m interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one. For me, space is that which encompasses everything.”

Originating from Seoul, South Korea, Suh graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the prestigious Seoul National University, South Korea. He later studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the United States (US), which was when he explored the technique of rubbing and measuring, in addition to a key turning point in his career as an artist when he started experimenting beyond the two dimensional form with installations and sculptures. Also in the United States, he completed his Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Yale.

Rubbing/Loving: Seoul House by Do Ho Suh. Image by Von Chua.

Part of artist Suh’s background and heritage is particularly prominent in this exhibition; Suh grew up in a traditional hanok Korean house built by his parents in the 1970s. In 1991, Suh emigrated from South Korea to the US for his education. It was during his time in the US that the theme of ‘home’ became a subject of interest. The hanok that is strongly ingrained in the artist’s memories emerged in his work since he emigrated to the US. In the latest exhibition at the Tate Modern, a key work on display is the Rubbing/Loving: Seoul House (2013-22), Suh covered the entirety of the exterior of the house in mulberry paper, then rubbed it in graphite to create a portable trace that has a ghostly quality, picking up on the traditional Korean architecture including the wood texture. For the artist, the act of rubbing is a means to explore where memory resides; Suh said that the hanok house ‘has always followed me’ even decades after leaving South Korea.

Besides rubbing as a form of drawing, Suh uses this medium to communicate and develop his ideas. In Walk the House, Suh’s works from 1999 to 2024 are on display, demonstrating the artist’s use of drawings over the course of the decades. A striking characteristic is Suh’s use of drawing, such as tracing, to capture the architectural characteristics of places that formed a significant part of his life - his home. Through these 1:1 transfers from wall to paper, he picks up the scale, the proportions, the architectural features, etc, of the houses that formed a part of his life in his home away from home; there is an act of preservation. Was he preserving the memory of a space that he lived in for two decades in New York? Or the act of tracing as a form of farewell to a space? This relationship between architecture, memory, time, and the body is a constant theme in Suh’s works. Below is a short excerpt of how Suh describes these ideas in his work,

Memory amalgamates in these spaces and memories shape our perceptions of them. Yet, they’re not stagnant. They’re not foreclosed environments in my work. They’re transportable, breathable and mutable.

Other forms of Suh’s medium on display are the artist’s large-scale fabric installations, which exist between precision and impression, and evoking a high sense of the space. Suh describes these installations as an act of memorialization; one can pack up these recorded spaces and transport them into another location, such as the Tate Modern. Suh calls them ‘fabric architecture’. I first experienced his fabric installation at an Art Basel installation; the sense of scale and enclosure within these large warehouses where art is presented, are pleasant moment of respite during a full day of viewing artworks. The long corridor, which is also present in the Walk the House exhibition, is a format that subtly directs visitors to walk through the fabric installation one after another, rather than crowding, which provides the opportunity for one to experience the artwork in an intimate setting, even when the exhibition space may be crowded. On top of this low-tech but immersive way of experiencing Suh’s artworks, Suh’s fabric installations possess an ethereal quality that is projected through their translucency and sense of scale, without portraying his theme in exact replication.

Fabric Architecture by Do Ho Suh. Image by Von Chua.

To visit and for more information about the exhibition, please visit Tate Modern’s website: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/the-genesis-exhibition-do-ho-suh