Walk The House
Detail from Do Ho Suh’s Nest/s (2024), a series of fabric replicas of rooms Suh has previously lived in (image: Jeon Taeg, courtesy of Suh, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro).
Do Ho Suh’s drawings look like fever dreams. In one, a man tries to reach a house by ascending staircases which loop nightmarishly like rollercoasters, while another shows a man holding a red house that has just been ripped from a hole where his heart should be. Hanging on the walls of the Tate Modern as part of Suh’s Walk the House exhibition, the sketches ache with homesickness. “I want to carry my home, my house, with me at all times, like a snail,” Suh said in an interview with Art in the 21st Century, an impossibility that he finds seemingly torturous.
These agonised sketches provide an interesting counterpoint to Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013-2022), Suh’s meticulous paper replica of his childhood home. The roiling emotions that propelled the piece seem to have mellowed through the painstaking process of measuring the house, wrapping it in paper, and rubbing it with graphite to expose the texture of the wood and bricks, with the final result standing serenely near the entrance of the exhibition like a place of worship. Held up by steel beams, the paper model looks looks deceptively solid at first glance – so much so that the co-curator of the show, Dina Akhmadeeva, keeps referring to it as if it were a real piece of architecture. “The fact that I’m talking about it as if it’s a building is a feat of the impossible made possible,” she says. Under closer inspection, however, the piece is revealed to be an apparition: the roof beams sag ever so lightly like papery jowls, giving the impression that the structure is made out of shedded snakeskin.
A paper replica of Suh’s childhood home (image: Jai Monaghan, courtesy of Suh, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro).
A traditional Korean hanok house with a curved tiled roof, Suh’s childhood home was itself a replica of a house on the grounds of a palace in Seoul, and it contrasted starkly with the high-rise apartment blocks that were built following the country’s liberation from Japan and destruction during the Korean War. This process of erasure through redevelopment is explored through Suh’s films Robin Hood Gardens (2018) and Dong In Apartments (2022), which capture two community housing blocks in London and Daegu right before they were demolished. “The home becomes a vehicle to not only think about what it means to carry spaces within us or for spaces to carry our memories, but also what it means for the architectural fabric of the city to change,” Akhmadeeva says. Both videos are filmed using a fly-through lens that slowly pans through the rooms, and the languorous pace is only briefly punctured when the camera spies a forklift silently gnawing on the building opposite Robin Hood Gardens, its predatory movements hinting at the apartment’s fate.
For Nest/s (2024), Suh collaged together replicas of rooms where he has lived in Seoul, New York and London into one long hallway (image: Sonal Bakrania, courtesy Suh, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro).
The voyeurism of peering at the remaining belongings in these apartments is evoked again through Nest/s (2024), a series of gauzy fabric replicas of rooms where Suh has lived in Seoul, New York, London and Berlin, which are collaged together to create one long space that resembles a hallway. Inside are fabric replicas of shower taps, fire extinguishers and extractor fans, alongside ornate features such as hexagon-shaped window frames and a door decorated with cherry blossoms. “What you see is a collaboration with sewers using techniques that have been passed down across generations,” Akhmadeeva says, describing how the translucent polyester structure is made using traditional Korean sewing techniques typically employed in clothes production. “And at the same time, you see these experiments with technology, such as digital rendering.” The resulting structure is detailed enough to feel like a real room, while also fulfilling Suh’s fantasy of being able to carry his home with him in a suitcase, or wear it like a piece of clothing.
Nest/s evokes the feeling of being in once place while holding another in your heart, an experience that is echoed in Perfect Home, a fabric outline of Suh’s current home in London that is filled with fixtures and fittings from places he and his family have lived over the years. Here, fabric plug sockets, doorknobs and light switches all hover at different heights, showing how small differences in layouts can have a disorienting effect. “Suh refutes the idea of linear time, he thinks about cycles of time,” Akhmadeeva says, explaining why his work repeatedly circles back to his former homes. “We really don't think about [the exhibition] as a retrospective or a survey in any way, but a sense of echoes and repetitions.” Suh’s emphasis on cyclical time mirrors the ebb and flow of grief, a theme which is explored in his work on both a personal and a societal level. Suh rubbed off his own fingerprints while creating replicas of his apartment in New York soon after his friend and landlord died with dementia, and he also created rubbings of the interior surfaces of buildings in Gwangju that bore witness to protests that were violently suppressed by the South Korean military.
For Perfect Home (2024), Suh filled a fabric outline of his current home in London with fixtures and fittings from places he and his family have lived over the years (image: Jeon Taeg Su, courtesy of Suh, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro).
While many of Suh’s pieces subtly evoke themes of identity, dislocation and loss, his speculative Bridge Project in the final room of the exhibition is stubbornly literal. Here, Suh proposes a utopian vision for his perfect home, which is located at the precise midpoint between Seoul, New York, and London. Isolated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Suh presents drawings and computer-animated designs of bridges that could connect the home to his three beloved cities, presenting an architecture built on emotion rather than reason. Each of the bridges is designed to contend with social, political and ecological issues, and Suh has collaborated with lawyers, architects, engineers, philosophers and more to give an unprecedented rigour to his nostalgia. “While his practice might feel like a very generous offering of an inside world of one, his work always involves an astonishing contribution by many,” Akhmadeeva says.
Contrary to popular belief, and in contrast to other shelled animals, snails are unable to move homes – they die with their original shells. Although humans are able to move more freely, Suh’s work interrogates how the memories and the impressions of the spaces we inhabit still follow us wherever we go. His work convincingly argues for an architecture that values sentimentality as highly as economic or structural optimisation, artfully showing how demolition and dislocation can fracture cities, communities and individuals. By approaching his own melancholy with a fantastical lens, Suh is also able to ruminate on the beauty of being shaped by our experiences, and the charm of taking a walk down memory lane. In one unusually joyful sketch, he draws outlines of houses emerging out of a man’s head like a crown; each one is larger than the last, and they birth each other like Russian dolls as they stretch into the sky.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown