FIELD NOTES
Do Ho Suh stitched his childhood home in Seoul into translucent celadon silk, packed it into two suitcases, and carried it to Los Angeles. The work has not stopped traveling since.
RUBBING/LOVING PROJECT: SEOUL HOME, 2013-2022. INSTALLATION VIEW, THE GENESIS EXHIBITION: DO HO SUH: WALK THE HOUSE, TATE MODERN, LONDON, 2025. THE SAME CHILDHOOD HANOK THE ARTIST FIRST RECONSTRUCTED IN SILK IN 1999, HERE REBUILT FROM PAPER RUBBINGS OF EVERY INTERIOR SURFACE. © DO HO SUH, COURTESY THE ARTIST, LEHMANN MAUPIN AND VICTORIA MIRO. PHOTO BY JAI MONAGHAN / TATE.
The story Do Ho Suh tells about the work begins on West 113th Street in Manhattan, sometime in the mid-1990s, in a small apartment across from a fire station. He had recently finished his degree at the Rhode Island School of Design and was spending a year in New York before starting graduate school at Yale. The sirens at night were constant. He could not sleep. Lying in bed, he found himself trying to remember the last time he had slept well, and the answer was the small room of his childhood home in Seoul. He decided to bring the room with him.
The house in question was not modest. Suh’s father, the ink painter Suh Se-ok, had built the family compound in Seoul in the 1970s as five separate structures, one of them modeled on the main quarters of a civilian-style house King Sunjo commissioned in 1878 for the gardens of Changdeokgung Palace. The wood was red pine, salvaged from the palace complex when other parts of it were dismantled. To carry such a building inside another country, Suh decided he would make it from cloth.
A first test in muslin, in his small New York studio, proved the idea worked. The full-scale piece took longer to fund. Seoul Home / L.A. Home / New York Home / Baltimore Home / London Home / Seattle Home was completed in 1999, sewn in celadon green silk organza over a thin aluminum armature, life size. The celadon is the color of paper used to line the ceilings of traditional Korean scholar’s rooms, where it stood for the sky. Suh carried the piece to Los Angeles in two suitcases for its first installation, at the Korean Cultural Center, and the title gained its second city. Every time the work has traveled since, another city has been added. The piece now belongs to MOCA in Los Angeles, but the title belongs only to its itinerary.
DETAIL OF THE STITCHED LATTICE. EVERY WOODEN MEMBER OF THE ORIGINAL HANOK IS RECORDED AS A SEAM AT 1:1 SCALE.
What is unusual about the work is the order of operations. Most architecture is photographed, modeled, drawn, then built. Suh’s hanok was built first, by his father, in wood. To rebuild it in silk he measured every centimeter of its existing surfaces and translated those measurements into stitched seams. The cloth house is not a representation of the original. It is the record of a survey. The act of measuring, Suh has said, is the act of memorialization. Errors of the hand stay in the cloth. So do the small marks he made on the wood as a child, copied as a faint shadow into the seams.
The choice of silk for the first version mattered. The fabric is heavy enough to read as a wall and light enough to fold into hand luggage. It catches the room’s air currents and answers them, slowly, at the roof line. Lit from one side, the green deepens; lit from another, it thins almost to absence. Later pieces in the same family use polyester instead, the fabric of fast fashion, cheaper and more available. The shift from silk to polyester carries its own meaning: the apartment work belongs to the same life, but it is the working life, the rented life, the life sustained by industrial materials.
NEST/S, 2024. POLYESTER AND STAINLESS STEEL, 410.1 × 375.4 × 2148.7 CM. INSTALLATION VIEW, THE GENESIS EXHIBITION: DO HO SUH: WALK THE HOUSE, TATE MODERN, LONDON, 2025. EIGHT THRESHOLDS FROM THE ARTIST’S FORMER HOMES IN SEOUL, NEW YORK, BERLIN AND LONDON, STITCHED INTO A SINGLE TWENTY-ONE METER PASSAGE. © DO HO SUH, COURTESY LEHMANN MAUPIN AND VICTORIA MIRO. PHOTO BY JAI MONAGHAN / TATE.
The Seoul piece opened a method, and the method has held for a quarter of a century. After 1999 came the apartments. 348 W. 22nd St., Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, in 2000, sewn in smoky nylon the color of New York dust. The Hub series, beginning around 2010, isolating the corridors and entrances of the buildings he had lived in: London, Berlin, Providence, Seoul again. Suh keeps a running inventory of his own thresholds. He calls the in-between spaces, the hallways and entryways, the places where transition is most felt.
Last year at Tate Modern, in the survey Walk the House, eight of these spaces were stitched into a single passage and called Nest/s. Polyester, stainless steel, twenty-one meters long. Visitors walked from a Seoul corridor into a New York one into a Berlin one into a London one without leaving the room. The exhibition’s title comes from a Korean phrase used for transporting a hanok: take it down, carry the parts to a new site, rebuild. Suh learned the phrase as a child. He has spent his working life enacting it.
DETAIL OF NEST/S. PHOTO BY JEON TAEG SU.
Suh has returned to the childhood hanok through other methods as well. Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, made between 2013 and 2022 and shown at Tate this year, reconstructs the same building from pencil and pastel rubbings of every interior surface, hung as a ghostly white shell in the shape of the original. The medium changes. The act of measurement remains. The house is the same house.
The work has obvious things to say about migration and the porousness of identity. It says them more quietly than the wall texts usually claim. What lingers is the simpler observation Suh made in his Manhattan apartment, before any of this had a vocabulary attached. A house is something you can carry. The materials are translucent because memory is. The seams show because the survey was done by hand. The title grows because the house keeps moving.
There is no permanent installation of Seoul Home. Each time it is shown, the work folds back into its crate and waits for the next city.
FURTHER READING
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Tate Publishing, 2025. Catalogue of the artist’s first major London survey in two decades, with extended writing on the Hub, Nest/s and Rubbing/Loving series and an interview in which Suh describes measurement as memorialization.
Sources: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Apollo Magazine; Frieze; Artforum; Art21.
— The Home&Decor Editors