tate modern opens 'walk the house,' do ho suh's first major UK solo exhibition in 20 years

Do Ho Suh: Walk the House opens AT THE tate modern

From May 1st to October 19th 2025, London’s Tate Modern presents Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, the artist’s first major solo show in the UK in 20 years. Organized in partnership with Genesis, the exhibition marks the vehicle brand’s first European project under its Art Initiatives program and spans three decades of Suh’s practice, centering on his recurring themes of space, memory, identity, and the idea of home (find designboom’s previous coverage here). During the preview on April 29th, 2025, Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator of international art at Tate Modern, shares insights into the exhibition with designboom. ‘We refuse to call the exhibition a retrospective or a survey,’ she notes. ‘Do Ho refutes the idea of a linear time. He thinks of cyclical time, cycles of time, and so this idea of a constant return is essential.’

Renowned for his walk-in fabric sculptures that replicate domestic spaces at full scale, Do Ho Suh transforms personal architecture into collective experience. Visitors move through translucent corridors of pale organza, stitched to trace the contours of homes Suh once inhabited, from Seoul to Providence to London, where physical memory is rendered into space. In the Turbine Hall galleries, new site-specific works such as Nest/s (2024) and Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) appear alongside rarely seen early works and recent video, drawing, and rubbing projects.

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 © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home inspires the title of the exhibition

Other pieces in Tate Modern’s exhibition explore the same ideas, more quietly. South Korean artist Do Ho Suh creates Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–22) and Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012) by rubbing every surface of buildings with pencil or pastel, imprinting the architectural skin onto paper.

The notion of cyclical return anchors the exhibition through Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–22), shown publicly here for only the second time since its debut in Australia in 2022. Created in 2013, the work is a delicate paper rubbing of the traditional Korean hanok house Suh’s parents built in the 1970s, during his adolescence. ‘The carpenters who held this huge wealth of knowledge as to how to build this wooden and paper architecture mentioned this phrase to Suh: ”walking the house,” or ‘making the house walk,”’ Akhmadeeva recounts. Though rarely used, the idiom resonated deeply with Suh, inspiring the title of the exhibition.

That poetic phrase has since shaped Suh’s entire practice, one that wrestles with mobility, displacement, and the nature of memory. ‘For Do Ho, this has become the fuelling point for the way that he imagines the core of his practice—this idea of the spaces that we might carry with us as we move through the world (…) thinking through the spaces that hold our memories.’ Interestingly, Suh did not consider the hanok home while living in Seoul; that sense of home only surfaced after his move to the U.S. in the 1990s.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 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 | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

various pieces stand alongside signature fabric architectures

The exhibition maps Suh’s personal and artistic returns to three cities he has called home—Seoul, New York, and London—across a 30-year career. While his translucent fabric architectures remain his most iconic works, Walk the House broadens the view, incorporating delicate works on paper, intimate drawings, and expansive video installations. Highlights include two new fabric architectures shown alongside Seoul Home, and looping LED videos that, as the co-curator states, ‘do something in conversation with Seoul Home that is an absolutely essential part of what Suh thinks about.’

Throughout, Suh prompts fundamental questions: What does it mean to inhabit a space? To carry it with you? To live among others? These questions echo in Who Am We?, a wallpapered corridor made from thousands of ID photos, emphasizing Suh’s exploration of the collective and the interdependence of identity.

Do Ho Suh, Staircase 2016, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

two site-specific pieces debut at the korean artist’s solo show

Tate’s Turbine Hall hosts two new site-specific works, including Nest/s (2024) and Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024). Nest/s (2024), a commissioned work made for Tate, showcases the latest evolution of Suh’s signature fabric architectures. Though recent, its roots reach back to the 1990s, when Suh first moved to the U.S. ‘He was grappling with what it meant to exist in that space of his studio, and he started measuring,’ mentions Dina Akhmadeeva during our exhibition tour. That act of measuring, a precursor to his fabric structures, parallels the rubbing process. It began with a jacket-like sculpture in 1994 titled Rub 516, formed from cotton and zippers, mapping the space of his New York studio. Nest/s (2024) belongs to Suh’s ongoing Hubs series, what he calls ‘impossible architectures,’ in which overlapping colors signal where distinct spaces intersect.

For Suh, architecture is inseparable from the body. ‘The way that he thinks about these fabric architectures really has to do with the body of clothing also—really embodying architecture as an experienced thing,’ Akhmadeeva emphasizes. ‘Architecture that doesn’t exist without the bodies that move through it.’ The translucent material requires and invites movement.

In Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), ‘every single color stands for a particular space or particular location across the world,’ she reveals.

Beyond their spectral elegance, these works also reflect Suh’s deep commitment to collaboration. ‘You’ll see this careful attention to craft and tradition that has been passed on across generations,’ highlights Akhmadeeva, referencing the meticulous hand-stitching by Suh’s teams of sewers in London and Seoul. ‘It’s a tension between the careful memories of an artist’s mental space and the careful process of collaboration, that’s absolutely essential in Do Ho’s generosity,’ she adds.

Bridge Project proposes the ‘perfect home’

The exhibition is the product of a long-term partnership involving Suh’s studio team of eleven, architects, fabricators in Korea, and curators at Tate. ‘We worked almost day-to-day for the last few years to make the show happen,’ Akhmadeeva recalls. ‘It’s not just memory work—it’s architectural, mathematical, and cultural all at once.’

In the final gallery, Suh’s long-running Bridge Project—ongoing since 1999—extends these questions to a planetary scale. It’s a conceptual proposal for a perfect home, located at the precise midpoint between Seoul, New York, and London. ‘It’s totally hypothetical,’ Akhmadeeva says, ‘a home located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.’ Created in collaboration with anthropologists, philosophers, indigenous elders, and lawyers, the Bridge Project demonstrates how Suh’s gentle, safe containers of memory remain in direct contact with the world.