London
In a recent interview, Korean artist Do Ho Suh said that space is simply a vessel for containing memories. In many respects, this observation holds the key to “Walk the House” (on view through October 26, 2025), his first major exhibition in London for a generation. Ideas of home and how we dwell in the world are at the heart of Suh’s large-scale installations, sculptures, videos, and drawings. Spanning three decades and multiple cities that he has called home—including Seoul, New York, and London—the exhibition coalesces around a Korean phrase that references an old idea of packing up a house and moving it through time and place. Rather than thinking of time as linear, however, Suh thinks of cycles of time and returns, carrying elements of one home to another.
Echoes and repetitions around geographies are important elements for his practice, as the search for the perfect and elusive home continues. Memorializing the everyday, providing a vehicle for memory in architectural and imagined space, Suh uses measuring and rubbing to set a series of contradictions in play—here and elsewhere, past and present, traditional and contemporary, individual and collaborative.
The vernacular Korean hanok dwelling is represented here in Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–22), a reconfiguration of Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012). The structure was created on a one-to-one scale by masking the building’s exterior with paper, then undertaking an intense process of rubbing the surface with graphite and colored pencil. Suh subsequently left the paper in place for nine months to allow the elements to leave their traces. He asks how spaces and surfaces can bear witness to personal and collective memory, perhaps contrary to the official histories of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980. The adjacent video works—Robin Hood Gardens, Woolmore Street, London E14 0HG (2018) and Dong in Apartments (2022)—document the changing architectural fabric of the 20th century, providing a context that shows hanok architecture as an outlier in the present-day world.
Nest/s (2024) invites visitors to enter and explore a colorful hybrid architecture rendered in polyester, layering their personal memories onto the forms. Suh began this approach when he clothed his Yale University studio in fabric to create a soft-form, translucent architecture in which hubs or nests emerged. The translucency is a deliberate choice; within the museum context, it brings the surrounding gallery space into the work, allowing for a blurring of artwork, architecture, and the bodies of visitors, which activate and become part of the installation.
Suh’s “Bridge Project,” an ongoing research experiment begun in 1999, strives to connect his various homes across temporal, spatial, and cultural divides, seeking perfection through integration. Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) is a phantasmagorical exercise in measuring and grappling with space—an impossible architecture and amalgamation of spaces. Suh’s precise attention to details, fixtures, and fittings within this palimpsest is a delight. Light fittings, door handles, key holes, and more from his homes in all six locations are sewn into the walls and ceiling of this soft, translucent architecture, animated by sewing techniques from across generations, which are transformed to create new experiments with technology that fuel visitors’ thinking. There is nothing dream-like about this space. Instead, it is a crucible for memory and imagination, on the part of artist and visitor alike.
