Do Ho Suh explores how architecture is "an important element in forming your identity" in Tate Modern exhibition

Artist Do Ho Suh has created a colourful, woven-together model of his former homes for the Walk the House exhibition, which opens today in London.

Named Walk the House after a Korean expression related to how a traditional hanok house could be disassembled and reassembled, the Tate Modern exhibition comprises architectural installations, videos and paintings.

According to Suh, architecture is fascinating because while people often can't choose where they live when they're young, it has a major impact on their lives.

"I guess it all started from my interest in the notion of personal space and how to define the personal space and a person's identity," he told Dezeen.

"The built environment came very naturally because for most of us, as soon as you're born, you're surrounded by the built environment without your choice," he continued.

"The architectural spaces are some of those preconditions that are imposed on you, like gravity, for example, and your parents; you cannot change those things, and that is such an important element in terms of forming your identity."

At Walk the House, visitors are first met by Suh's Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home, which the artist created in 2012 by covering the walls and roof of his childhood home in paper and rubbing it with graphite.

The paper was then left on the house for months to be marked by the weather. The end result, with its intricate stone pattern and traces of rain and sun, has been spanned over an aluminium frame.

The installation encapsulates Suh's fascination with the relationship between home as a physical space and the more intangible connotations of the word, which he has explored throughout his career.

"The word home is interesting because it implies not only the physical architectural space, but intangible elements, like a family or memories – I'm interested in both dimensions, but the idea of the home became more apparent when I left Korea and moved to US to to go to school," he said.

Walk the House marks the first time that Tate Modern has changed the layout of its Blavatnik building exhibition spaces, removing the interior walls to better showcase Suh's 1:1 scale installations and let the audience meander through the space.

A new work, Nest/s 2024, takes advantage of the sizeable room. Sat centre-stage, the installation comprises colourful textile full-scale versions of places in which Suh has lived, connecting Seoul, New York and London, his home since 2010.

While he sees his work as somewhat architectural, Suh describes his pieces as "a sculpture that has an inside and an outside".

"You not only see the exterior surface, but you can enter it, and then it becomes architectural," he said.

"At the same time, I don't really create a new space, I experience and interpret this space that is already built by someone else or designed by architects," he added.

"So I'm more like a consumer or user of the space, and then I recreate those spaces in different materials in a one-to-one scale – the scale is really important."

Suh's textile installations, replicas of former homes or dwellings, are perhaps his best-known works, but Walk the House also shows a piece made using a 3D-printer, a method the artist has been working with since the mid '90s.

Called Home Within Home, the 2025 installation merges his first home in Seoul with his first US home in Providence, with the Korean hanok house situated inside an American building.

"It's hard to know in my mind whether that Korean home has entered into the Providence home, or it started to grow inside of the Providence home," Suh said.

"The project is about investigating this negotiation between two different architectural styles."

Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul from 2024 takes the spatial shape and measures of Suh's current London home and fills it with architectural features – like doorknobs and lightswitches – from other places in which his family has lived.

Like Suh's other textile pieces, it is made from Korean textiles used to create traditional Hanbok outfits, which has a translucent quality.

Walk the House also shows Suh's ongoing Bridge Project, which explores the impossibility of a "perfect home", as well as two video works that examine the Dong In Apartments and Robin Hood Gardens housing blocks in Daegu and London.

Capturing Robin Hood Gardens on film before the housing project was demolished in 2024 was a way of delving deeper into issues around housing, something that Suh finds fascinating.

"Most of the places where I've lived, I don't see them as mine; it's like handed-over clothing, they have traces and energies of the people who lived there before," he explained.

"I've been very aware of housing problems in the world – so many people have been displaced for political or economical reasons, and so it wasn't that difficult to embark on this project, which is someone else's house," Suh added.

Time constraints meant that he wanted to make the most use of the time that he had in Robin Hood Gardens, with the end result being a time-lapse video that shows the space before it was torn down and connects back to Suh's feelings about his own former homes.

"That project was really special, to be able to record a building that was going to be dismantled," he concluded. "Because I think of all the homes where I lived, but I left; in a way, they share the same fate in my mind."

Previous works by Suh include a traditional Korean house installed above a London street and an installation that reflects on his experience of migration.

The photography is by Jai Monaghan unless otherwise stated.

Walk the House is at Tate Modern until the 19th of October. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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