The Brooklyn Rail

With its instructive title, Do Ho Suh: Walk the House invites visitors to move through a life—room by room, and seam by seam. The exhibition charts Suh’s decades-long investigation into the architectures of memory, from intimate dwellings and household fixtures to state-sanctioned monuments. His iconic 1:1 fabric reconstructions of domestic interiors—paired here with works on paper and collaborative performances—ask what it means and what remains when the places we once called home exist only as impressions. But rather than framing memory as a static imprint, this show emphasizes its movement—how it drifts, accumulates, and transforms across time and bodies.

For this major survey at Tate Modern, Suh debuts Nest/s (2024), a new installation that stitches together eight translucent fabric rooms and passageways from his former homes. We typically encounter the bare structure of a home only when moving in or out; in that state of transition, the architectural shell becomes a poignant metaphor for migration itself. Here, Suh’s overlapping structures form a tunnel of spectral architecture, slightly nested within each other to suggest that no single place contains the entirety of a life. The exhibition similarly unfolds not as a chronological retrospective, but as a sustained inquiry into how memory is materialized—stitched, measured, worn, and rebuilt. Like entangled recollections, Suh’s spaces are never fully separate, never fully whole. The layering reads less as a visual trick than a lived logic. Memory doesn’t stack neatly, but overlaps, interferes, and folds back in on itself.

In Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), Suh monumentalizes the overlooked surfaces of daily life. Light switches, keyholes, power outlets, and radiators are rendered with such reverent precision that you might identify a location by the shape of a socket or the label on a thermostat. These are the parts of the home we constantly touch but rarely notice until they’re gone, or replaced, or unexpectedly reencountered elsewhere. Some, like the weight of a key in your hand or the turn of a familiar lock, can pull us back to a place we once knew. But even the most generic or anonymous fixtures feel oddly intimate here, turned into evidence of a life lived. That attention—almost devotional—makes them tender.

While the immersive fabric installations are undeniably the centerpiece of the exhibition—monumental, brightly colored, and centrally placed in the galleries—Walk the House also includes a number of smaller, wall-mounted drawings, thread works, and studies created between 1999 and 2025. Tucked along the gallery’s periphery and quieter in tone and scale, they don’t command attention in quite the same way. In Staircase (2016), for instance, Suh uses red thread sewn into delicate tissue to model a domestic staircase, then transfers the composition onto wet paper so the tissue dissolves, leaving behind a ghostly imprint. The piece transforms a three-dimensional structure into a fragile, two-dimensional memory. While less visually immediate than the installations, works like Staircase underscore Suh’s interest in memory as something that collapses, fades, or is quietly absorbed into the background.

But what sustains this architecture of remembrance? Suh’s translucent structures may appear delicate or dreamlike, but they rely on an extraordinary amount of labor and intensive collaboration: teams of fabricators who sew, measure, and replicate entire buildings; performers who carry out durational tasks. For Suh, memory is not a passive imprint but an active process across many hands.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012). While blindfolded, Suh and his collaborators made rubbings of a building linked to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, just before its demolition. The performance video is one of the show’s most compelling moments: the participants move methodically and persistently, attempting, yet inevitably missing, to trace every surface in this act of shared memory work. The result is partial rubbings, impressions that don't resolve into a total architectural plan. These are displayed flat against the gallery wall, muting their spatial force. While the concept is striking—a meditation on collective memory as fragmentary and embodied—the installation feels more archival than affective, less visceral than the act it documents. This aspect of Suh’s work—the shared act of remembering—is what lingers most. Rather than approaching the exhibition as a monument to displacement, I found myself drawn to its quieter premise that memory is collaborative, and always incomplete. Our impressions are not simply housed within us, but also built, held, and maintained by others. How many hands does it take to hold a memory in place? What kinds of scaffolding—emotional, material, institutional—are required to keep the past intact, even in fragments?

The exhibition closes with Bridge Project (1999–), a long-term inquiry into the idea of a “perfect home” and its dissonance with contemporary realities shaped by housing insecurity, climate change, and forced migration. But unlike earlier works that dwell in nostalgia and trace the past, Bridge Project turns toward the imagined future. Working with a team of researchers, architects, and designers, the artist proposes four speculative bridge designs that would connect Seoul and New York—not just physically, but psychologically, culturally, and ecologically. Drawing on oceanographic data, migration patterns, and geopolitical conditions, Suh imagines architectures that accommodate movement—structures that are porous, relational, and always becoming. In this way, he reimagines home not as a place of retreat, but as a frame through which we remain in relation to others and the world. It’s a fitting conclusion to an exhibition that invites us to consider home as something never fixed but rather something we pass through, carry with us, and collectively imagine into being.