Thirty years of Do Ho Suh, and the many things his homes were asked to mean

Almost everyone has a home that they think of with fondness. A home is somewhere you go back to daily, an intimate and comforting place that resonates only with you — but at the “Do Ho Suh” exhibition that opens at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) on Thursday, museumgoers are invited into replicas of the monumental artist’s various homes past and present; hung, displayed and installed in sequence.

Do Ho Suh, born in 1962 in Seoul, is famed internationally for “fabric architecture,” a series of installation pieces made out of colorful stitched nylon and polyester. They have become one of the most well-recognized and loved collections in contemporary art, shown globally across countless cities. The new MMCA exhibition showcases a sweeping selection of Suh's most representative works, along with never-before-shown pieces, totaling more than 500 works of art.

The pieces are themselves an experience the audience can literally walk through, first taking in the sheer beauty of the architecture before observing up close the intricate details of each fabric-made doorknob, pipe, light switch or hole in the wall.

While these works are the most beloved of Suh’s body of art, his other pieces, including his early sketches from his days at Seoul National University (SNU), Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Yale; a series utilizing the motif of school uniforms; sculptures held up by tiny figurines and three dimensional drawings using thread; are each also on display at the “Do Ho Suh” show at the MMCA Seoul.

Together, the works are interpreted most often as a record or reflection on movement, memories of home, longing and social collectivity.

There is, of course, no “correct” way to approach a work, but Suh’s new exhibition, showcasing three decades of art, is much more complex and abundant in meaning when looked at in-depth. A closer reading of his work and the exhibition opens up discussions on the dialectic meanings of the large themes he deals with, and shows how the art world itself, as the backdrop of Suh’s career, was structured.

Related Article

• Do Ho Suh's sculpture 'Public Figures' graces Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Asian Art

• Art in Seoul: What to see and where to be in 2026

• Frieze, Kiaf to shine ‘Spotlight’ on ‘coexistence’ in final year under same roof

Before the homes

The works that first made Suh’s name internationally have no houses in them at all.

“Floor,” shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001, is a glass platform that a visitor walks onto before noticing that anything is underneath it. Below are tens of thousands of small plastic figures, their arms raised to hold up the floor above.

“Considered individually, each figure is fragile and seemingly vulnerable; together, however, the thousands of tightly packed figures become capable of bearing tremendous weight,” said Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, the gallery that has represented Suh since the late 1990s.

“Some/One,” from the same year, is a hollow robe of military dog tags spilling out across the floor of the room, its interior mirrored and empty. Suh made it after his own mandatory service. In “Who Am We?” (2000-12), the wallpaper piece he began in the mid-1990s, thousands of faces taken from the artist’s high school yearbooks recede at a distance into what looks like a faint printed texture.

“The collective contains, absorbs and dissolves the individual,” Suh told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “But it also forms a backdrop against which individuality can assert itself.”

His interest is in the boundary itself, “the in between,” where the two “mutually suppress and support one another.”

Miwon Kwon, an art historian at UCLA who wrote the first English-language review of Suh’s work in 1998 and has followed his work since, noticed early that with “Floor,” the viewer plays dual roles: the body being held up and the weight bearing down. In her 2002 essay on Suh’s work, Kwon left the central question intentionally open: “Are we the agents of our liberation or of our oppression?”

“[Suh’s works concern] how we belong and what you give up in order to belong,” Kwon said. “Whatever is different, whatever is distinctive, you’re supposed to play down.”

How they learned to travel

The common account of how Suh arrived at the fabric architecture goes through displacement and diaspora. Lee Jae-hee, a researcher at SNU who has written papers and essays on Suh’s “Seoul Home” (2013-22) series, however, thinks that interpreting his works through that discourse misses something.

“More precisely, it starts from a concrete personal experience,” Lee said. “Works rarely begin in discourse.”

The concrete experience, in this case, comes from an anecdote after Suh's move to New York in the 1990s. After days of sleepless nights amid the never-ending sirens, Suh came to realize that his restlessness stemmed from the absence of home — not the place where he physically lived, but a place he could truly call home.

At RISD, Suh began making site-specific rooms he assumed would die the moment they left their locations. The distinction between moving a place and translating one is what the fabric works are built on.

It is worth being precise about the model for one of the first of Suh’s fabric homes. The house in Seongbuk-dong, central Seoul, that became “Seoul Home/L.A. Home” was a hanok (traditional Korean house) his father built, modeled on a royal building from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910).

“Suh did not create the hanok to emphasize Korean tradition or Korean identity, but rather to faithfully recreate the house where he lived as a child,” said Mina Kim, an art historian at the University of Alabama, arguing that Suh’s choice was not a statement of cultural allegiance.

“[Suh] sought to measure his living space and understand the spaces he passed through in his life, and I believe his work, visualized this way, enabled many people today to contemplate the living spaces they may or may not have perceived.”

Specific enough to be universal

None of this explains why a stranger who has never been to Seongbuk-dong stops for so long in front of one of Suh’s fabric homes.

Joan Kee, an art historian at NYU who first saw Suh’s work in the mid-1990s when he was at Yale, sees part of the answer in a piece of his training that is rarely discussed. He came to sculpture through Eastern ink painting at SNU, and the two instruct opposite things.

“Ink painting teaches an artist to work with voids, to let absence carry as much as mark does,” Kee said. “Sculpture teaches volume, the way a form displaces space and pushes resistance back into the hand that shapes it. Suh’s feel for both the void and the mass may be what allows a work like ‘Staircase’ [2003-16] to hold memory as architecture rather than merely illustrate it.”

"Staircase" is a series of fabric installations of stairs from different homes that Suh has lived in.

The transparency of the fabric is generally read as ghostliness, a place present and absent at once. Suh’s own explanation is more literal and considerably stranger.

“The reason I use transparent fabric is essentially because you can see the inside and outside of the structure simultaneously,” Suh said. “The fabric architecture is predicated on a multiplicity of perspectives.”

A generalized room would be recognizable to nobody; what makes these rooms so “universal” is that they are a specific someone, built at the size a body already knows. Suh works at a one-to-one scope and is strictly disciplined about it — the fabric architecture is not scaled up for spectacle; it keeps the dimensions of the small bedroom or the narrow corridor it was taken from.

“The scale is what your body responds to, and that triggers memory,” Suh has said. Not his memory, but the viewer’s.

These arguments describe the artwork, but not how it became internationally famous. That "calls for a wider optic than the artist can supply alone," according to Kee — a set of conditions "unevenly assembled, part exhibition history, part institutional investment, part theoretical labor," each on its own timeline before converging on Suh's practice in the late 1990s.

Kwon, reflecting on the “multiculturalism” in those same years in the United States, puts it in social context: Art institutions then were very eager to show more nonwhite artists in order to “do the right thing, democratically speaking.” Neither is describing Suh's success as unearned, but that his art found especially fortuitous timing and receptive conditions.

What weightlessness conceals

Other artists of Suh’s early periods also made work about movement, but what distinguishes him is that he made mobility architectural — something grounded, fixed and site-specific that is nonetheless portable. A key point that art historians make about Suh is that his particular form of movement is not of something uniform or evenly shared in experience. Suh himself often speaks of his displacement being voluntary.

“Suh’s trajectory needs to be situated within [the] broader contextualization of Korea’s rapid economic growth and globalization in the 1990s, the same decade that made his kind of movement possible and that the art world was celebrating,” said Eunice Uhm, an art historian at San Diego State University.

The very material of Suh’s most recognized works also calls for further contextualization. Fabric architecture is among the most labor-intensive things in contemporary art, with the measuring, the pattern-making, cutting, stitching, engineering, installation and deinstallation, almost none of it done by Suh alone.

Sewing in Korea also has a particular history. Textile manufacturing was central to Korean industrialization and was overwhelmingly performed by women whose contribution has been materially enormous and almost entirely invisible.

“I don’t think we can or should treat sewing simply as a poetic material metaphor for memory,” Uhm said.

Suh is presenting the entire credit list of everyone involved in the fabrication of the major installations, stretching back many years, in the MMCA exhibition, a long-planned initiative that addresses the very point Uhm presses.

Kwon’s version of the criticism is aimed at the viewer rather than the object. Her 2002 essay questioned a favorable review in which a Western critic stood in front of Suh’s “Seoul Home” and projected her own childhood house. 

“It’s perhaps a gesture of appreciating cultural difference, but at the same time the critic is saying ‘I see myself in your culture, your culture is like mine,’ or even ‘we are the same,’” Kwon said. In what appears to be an embrace of the other can obscure differences and leave a cultural hierarchy of relations embedded in it.

There is another complication to the universality story that comes from Lee, who has compared how the work was received city by city as it traveled. In Los Angeles, with its Korean American community, “Seoul Home” was received through a diasporic lens. In Seoul, it produced something closer to romance, an admiring picture of the nomadic, cosmopolitan artist. In London, the response was noticeably more guarded, with some critics treating Suh’s Serpentine show as trading on Korean identity.

Thirty years in the void

Suh's artwork and practice have clearly never divided neatly into compartments, inviting such a broad and complex array of interpretations.

Suh’s whole body of work is one continuous inquiry rather than a sequence of phases, according to Kim — the pieces “address the same question in different forms while sharing the identity of coexistence.”

A Buddhist strand runs through “Karma” (2002) and “Cause and Effect” (2008-09), works in which figures stand on each other’s shoulders in accumulating spirals, as a long attempt at three questions Suh has said he keeps putting to himself: “Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going?”

The artist is unfazed by the question of repetition, and provided a perspective on the nature of time.

“I have always repeated myself. I see my practice as cyclical, which relates to the way I see time more broadly,” he said.

Such cyclical nature of Suh's artwork suggests a way for audiences to stand in front of it, a way for them to take the pieces in. The opposites people find in it — individual and collective, rootedness and mobility, holding on and letting go — are not choices the work is asking a viewer to make. Kwon is firm on this point, that what look like contradictions are “dialectical relations” rather than opposing ones.

None of this forecloses the more obvious response, which is that Suh's fabric architecture are beautiful, and that walking through one is a powerful experience on its own. The only risk is that viewers may stop there — mistaking the beauty for the whole encounter.

What is on view at the MMCA Seoul is not simply a set of visually beautiful installations, but an invitation to sit with all the questions and reflections they raise.

The "Do Ho Suh" exhibition runs through February 2027.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]