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.
