Upon getting into Do Ho Suh: Stroll the Home at Tate Trendy, the customer is confronted with a closed door. However it isn’t one which blocks passage into the exhibition, or stops you instantly studying the vary of works filling the extensive open Blavatnik Constructing gallery. The door is a part of the meticulously sewn and constructed Nest/s (2024), a collection of 1:1 reproductions of thresholds of properties the South Korean artist has lived in, fragments of structure from Seoul, New York, London, and Berlin.
Fabricated from an historic Korean cloth approach, Suh has recreated these momentary areas from a polyester designed for the style trade, combining the geographic segments collectively into one lengthy, ghostly passageway. Monumental in scale, it carries effective element all through, all the way down to the producer logos on air vents, particular person components of hinges, mild switches, and sockets. To stroll down the centre of those interlocking areas is to stroll via the sorts of connecting areas designed to be practical however forgettable, every with particular geographic particulars, which Suh’s has reconstructed as an act of celebration, reminiscence, and presence.
Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Mission: Seoul House, 2013-2022, set up view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Stroll the Home.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh. Picture © Tate (Jai Monaghan))
For over twenty years, Suh has been exploring the concept and situations of “house”, most recognisably via such large-scale cloth constructions. His apply, nevertheless, covers a spread of mediums together with fashions, drawings, movie, and paper constructions, a number of of which line the partitions of the open gallery: a shiny pink staircase Suh remade with gelatine tissue paper is flattened and part-dissolved into an abstraction of area; a scale resin mannequin of Suh’s former Windfall house has a standard Korean Hanok home embedded inside its guts; a wall of sketches of homes with legs, concepts of motion, and our bodies in area reveal Suh’s pondering of migration, rootedness, and being.
“After residing in London for 15 years I realised that once I’m in my flat, I nonetheless take into consideration my house in Korea, and a spot that I lived in New York for 25 years,” the artist explains, “and people recollections of various areas truly exist on the very current second.” At one finish of the passage is one other big cloth work, a white tent-like area inside that are stitched 3D renderings of inside particulars from six of Suh’s former properties. It’s an uncanny compact of locations represented via the small moments of contact: door handles, mild switches, telephones, towel rails, sockets. It speaks to how we inhabit place, how we navigate our home panorama, and the moments the place we work together with it past the visible.
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, set up view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Stroll the Home.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh. Picture © Tate (Jai Monaghan))
The haptic is central to those concepts of area and that is portrayed no extra richly than with Rubbing/Loving: Seoul House (2013-22), a 1:1 mannequin of Suh’s childhood house, an exquisite conventional Korean Hanok constructed by his dad and mom within the Seventies. An adjoining video paperwork a painstaking strategy of wrapping the house in paper, rubbing it fully in graphite, then rigorously chopping the paper away forward of its reconstruction. It’s a delicate, haunting reconstruction, however knowingly imperfect – simply as our recollections of previous properties are equally flawed. “I used to be by no means fascinated about replicating locations 100%, and I knew it won’t excellent, however what I used to be fascinated about was the edge that triggers these recollections.”
These works are about figuring out and studying area via presence, contact, and time, reasonably than via an actual documenting with know-how, lidar, or images. Suh does, nevertheless, convey digital applied sciences into a few of his work. Two movies are proven at one finish of the gallery, talking to up to date neoliberal housing crises. East London’s Robin Hood Gardens, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and at present present process the ultimate levels of its controversial demolition, is documented via a 2018 work wherein Suh slowly, rigorously paperwork inside residences whereas the constructing round begins to be deconstructed – the residents current in Suh’s horizontal and vertical panning photographs that painting the rapid individuality and persona of individuals’s properties whereas the extra distant view exhibits the Metropolis’s monetary towers and development websites of encroaching gentrification.
Do Ho Suh, House Inside House (1/9 Scale) 2025, set up view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Stroll the Home.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh. Picture © Tate (Jai Monaghan))
“The precise housing programmes in UK have been one thing that struck me … the destiny of the constructing, the failure of the this form of utopian structure, and displacement of the folks,” Suh explains. This and an accompanying movie made 4 years later in Daegu, South Korea, equally documenting residences earlier than demolition, carry essentially the most rapid political presence within the present. But, simply as the material buildings the movies share the exhibition with, it’s via the minute element, private, and haunting presence of lives lived within the house environments that talk louder than the preliminary monumental type.
Do Ho Suh’s exhibition, ‘Stroll the Home’ at Tate Trendy, is on till 19 October 2025
tate.org.uk
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist. Picture: Catherine Hyland)
Supply: Wallpaper
