Do Ho Suh, Walk the House @ Tate Modern

Do Ho Suh, My Homes, 2010

As someone who has lived in different countries, I was fully immersed in and mesmerized by Do Ho Suh's Walk the House exhibition at Tate Modern. I was right there with him in his project to convince us of the ways that space and architecture are simply the tangible structures for housing identity, memory, and the experiences that give meaning to life. I immediately identified with his desire to find home—whatever that means—within walls, in the objects around him, the intuitive sense of the air that fills a space, the relationships developed therein. As a voyager, like him, I know that home has to be portable, able to be experienced in multiple apartments, carried on my back, across oceans and decades. But, I kept wondering if visitors rooted in a single country, culture, house or apartment were able to fully engage with the longing and yearning for belonging? These feelings are what really shape those of us who lead transitory lives.

Do Ho Suh, Blueprint, 2014

Immediately inside the exhibition, a series of works set a tone that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent a life in transition. Colourful images of homes on legs and wheels, rushing to the next location in My Homes (2010), or connected to a parachute flying across skies in (Haunting Home, 2019) are touching, playful, and all too real for those of us who have never sat still. Another work for which Do Ho Suh has used the same process— hundreds of multi-coloured threads embedded on paper—sees a facade of a New York apartment block with a figure blending into the tangled web of threads on the inside. The complex weave of life inside the front door, through the window, the emotions, experiences, woven into the fabric of daily life, that we nevertheless keep hidden from others are the substance of our life inside any space that we occupy. 

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

Do Ho Suh works in multiple media, but I especially enjoyed his use of fabric. In a work such as Perfect Home (2024), handles, locks, sockets, wall telephones, bells, keypads from multiple apartments in which the artist has lived are integrated into a transparent polyester model of his London apartment. Visitors are invited to walk through the space as well as around it, watching others as shadows—like ghosts—on the other side, removing the distinction between inside and outside, and with it the certainty of who occupies and who is locked out. Bringing together fixtures from multiple apartments across borders and oceans, cultures and customs, Do Ho Suh's Perfect Home is not fixed in time; it is an accumulation of times and spaces. The perfect home is marked by entrances and exits, the turning on and off of a light switch. Home, in this work is defined by the transitional, the motion between here and there. Similtaneously, home is the familiar, yet mundane things that we hold onto as if they were forever.   

Do Ho Suh, Nests, 2024

Thanks to the different forms and fabrics of his installations, the exhibition is connected by ideas and feelings about home and our relationships to spaces. Dong In Apartments (2022) is a video reconstruction of decaying modernist apartment blocks in Seoul shortly before their destruction. The camera halts at windows, furniture, floors, and walls, as if to document loss, searching for the crevices where memories live. Chairs remember the person who sat in them, the people who breathed the air are still there, the furniture arranged to bring back the lives whose stories are told by the walls. The film reminds us that space is not static, because time doesn't sit still, that the thresholds and props of our lives keep moving, if only, as is the case in this film, into demolition and another living and working space.

Do Ho Suh, Robin Hood Gardens, 2018
Film still

Houses, spaces, buildings carry memories inside their walls, the feeling of the air, the layout of the walls become so familiar that we navigate them intuitively, our eyes closed. Spaces created in concrete and steel look different when others are next to us, inside together. For Do Ho Suh, we carry this baggage on our backs, wherever we go. For him, Home is a feeling inside of which we are surrounded by the mess of our emotions and senses, nothing to do with the walls themselves. Across the exhibition, as we move through passageways, around fabric sculptures, up close to threaded images, we find the often invisible threads that bind us together across generations, oceans, and cultures. For all of the physical journeying that we undertake, the material that brings life to the notion of home, for Do Ho Suh, these threads, have both a material and non-material existence. And despite the physical existence of the walls around us, and the emphasis we place on the intransigence of objects, the overwhelming message of the exhibition is that home is carried inside us.