Walking the House: Do Ho Suh and the Homes We Carry With Us

NOVA ESEA
Dec 4, 2025
3 min read

Do Ho Suh: Walk the House Exhibition at Tate Modern

Stepping into Do Ho Suh’s exhibition at Tate Modern feels a bit like walking into a memory made of air and colour. Walls become sheer fabric, doors glow in soft pinks and greens, and everyday objects, door handles, light switches, radiators, hover like ghosts of all the places we’ve lived in but never quite left behind.

For those of us who’ve left home and rebuilt our lives elsewhere, his work hits very close to the bone.

Who is Do Ho Suh?

Do Ho Suh (b. 1962) is a South Korean artist known for his large-scale installations, sculptures and drawings that explore home, memory and belonging. Born in Seoul, he first trained in traditional Korean painting before moving to the US to study at Rhode Island School of Design and later sculpture at Yale.

Over the past three decades, he has become renowned for his “fabric architectures”: full-scale, translucent recreations of the houses and apartments he has lived in around the world, stitched together in coloured mesh and suspended in galleries so that visitors can literally walk through his memories. Tate describes this exhibition as his first major solo show in London for a generation, bringing together work from across his career.

What anchors his practice is a simple but powerful question: what is home when your life is constantly on the move?

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home 2013-2022 — Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022)

Inside Walk the House: corridors, rubbings and a seven-colour maze

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House gathers many of these architectural works into one immersive journey. At Tate Modern, you move through a constellation of homes and projects that span decades of his practice.

One of the centrepieces is Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a sweeping installation that fuses different dwellings from his life into a single, continuous structure. You walk through it and the colours shift – green, purple, yellow, blue – as if you’re passing from one city and era to another without ever really stopping.

Do Ho Suh: Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) — Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024)

Then there’s Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), where Suh has made full-scale rubbings of the surfaces of his family home in Korea – walls, doorframes, switches – using coloured paper and graphite. It’s a very different approach from the fabric houses, but the impulse is the same: to hold onto the texture of a place you might have to leave behind.

And my personal favourite: Nest/s (2024).

This new work envelopes visitors in a long, multicoloured fabric corridor, a kind of seven-colour maze that you walk through slowly. For me, Nest/s feels like a visualisation of what happens every time we move countries or cities: each new home layering itself over the previous one, never fully replacing it. The fact that it was created with the help of over thirty sewing artisans and digital modellers adds another layer of meaning; home here is something collectively built, carefully stitched together, foldable and portable, ready to be packed up and carried to the next chapter.

Seeing it as someone who left home too

As someone who also left the place I grew up and ended up in the UK, I felt very seen in this exhibition.

His work, inspired by his Korean hanok childhood home and later apartments around the world, mirrors the kind of nomadic, in-between life so many of us live. He uses those domestic details to record and reflect on the dislocation of migration and the shifting meaning of “home”. We’re both, in our own ways, trying to track our memories and sense of identity across multiple cities and timelines.

What is home, when it keeps moving?

Walking through Walk the House, I kept coming back to this thought:

“Home isn’t a fixed address. It’s something that can move, multiply, stretch across continents and still live inside you.”

For those of us building lives in the UK, especially in cities like London, where so many people are away from their “first” home, Suh’s work feels like an invitation to rethink what home means. Is it your passport country? Your current flat? Your mother’s kitchen? The friends you eat hotpot with on a rainy Sunday in London?

His fabric houses don’t give answers, but they gently suggest that home can be layered and portable, something you fold up and carry with you, even when you’re far from where you started.