092 DO HO SUH


FEW ARTISTS navigate the intersection of personal history, architecture and memory as evocatively as Do Ho Suh. Best known for his ethereal fabric sculptures of domestic spaces, the South Korean artist has spent decades constructing intricate homages to the buildings in which he has lived, all the while ruminating on the notion of home as both a physical structure and a deeply emotional experience. Tis spring, Suh’s large-scale installations, sculptures, videos and drawings are the subject of a major survey at Tate Modern, the artist’s largest in London since 2002. Bringing together works from the past three decades, Walk the House (1 May – 19 October) examines the complex relationship between architecture, the body and the memories that shape our lives, inviting visitors to join the artist in pondering the enigma of home: is it a place, a feeling or a construction of the mind? Born in Seoul in 1962, Suh has led a relatively itinerant life, moving between


cultures, languages and architectural surroundings. He initially studied traditional Korean art in his home country before migrating to the US in 1991, where he received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1997. Since then he has based himself in New York, Berlin and London, frequently hopping back and forth between these locations. In the late 1990s he began exploring themes of place and identity by making brightly coloured one-to-one scale fabric sculptures of architectural interiors. Using diaphanous sheets of polyester, he has obsessively recreated his childhood home in South Korea and apartments and studios in Berlin, New York and London. ‘My architecture pieces are all basically outlines,’ Suh has said of these walk-through sculptures that, supported by simple steel frames, give form to ideas about ideas about migration, displacement and transience. Several are on show at Tate Modern and, though they appear


as precise as blueprints, Suh concedes that these ghostly structures are not 100% accurate. ‘People think they are really precise,’ he has said. ‘But, of course, I’m not actually trying to exactly replicate a physical structure in fabric. It’s more about capturing enough visual and physical information to evoke a sense of the space as I experienced it. ‘Home started to exist for me when I no


longer had it,’ said Suh, who regularly brings together multiple interior spaces in single installations. Referred to as ‘Hubs’, these composite works invite visitors to explore interconnected rooms, corridors and entranceways that replicate domestic spaces from the cities in which the artist has resided. Tey are crafted using a combination of traditional Korean sewing techniques and cutting-edge 3D modelling and mapping technologies. Each one is filled with carefully embroidered architectural features, including door handles, electrical sockets and light switches. As you walk through these fragile


PHOTO: GAUTIER DEBLONDE


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