Korean-born, London-based artist Do Ho Suh has built an international reputation by transforming personal memories of home into immersive works of art . Best known for his life-size fabric sculptures of domestic spaces, Suh examines how architecture, space and memory shape our sense of identity. Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? His art asks this question, blurring the boundary between physical dwellings and the intangible experiences and emotions they hold . Through translucent textile replicas of his former apartments, painstaking rubbings of household surfaces, and other inventive techniques, Suh explores what it means to carry one’s home and history from one locale to another. The result is deeply personal yet universally resonant work that invites viewers to reflect on their own notions of belonging and self.
“Walk the House”: A Journey Through Home at Tate Modern
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House – Suh’s landmark show at Tate Modern in 2025 – brings these themes to life on an ambitious scale. On view from May to October 2025, this major survey spans three decades of Suh’s practice, marking his first major solo exhibition in London in a generation . The exhibition was made possible by Tate’s partnership with Genesis (Hyundai’s luxury brand), and its very title, “Walk the House,” nods to a Korean phrase describing how a traditional hanok house could be uprooted and moved to a new site . In Suh’s hands, this idea of literally carrying one’s house becomes a powerful metaphor: visitors to Tate Modern are invited to walk through the artist’s memories of home, space, and identity. Inside the gallery, Suh has removed conventional walls to create an open labyrinth of art, mirroring the way memories flow and overlap . Each work on display engages the enigma of home and how it shapes who we are .
Exhibition Highlights:
Nest/s (2024) – a new immersive installation that stitches together corridors and entryways from houses and apartments Suh has lived in. This maze-like “impossible architecture” merges rooms from Seoul, New York, London and beyond into one interconnected passage , visually layering decades of memories and migrations into a single walkable space.
Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) – a vibrant 1:1 fabric outline of Suh’s current London home, populated with translucent replicas of everyday objects (from light switches to doorknobs) sewn in assorted colors . By recreating intimate domestic details in cloth, Suh transforms personal history into a shared, tangible experience that viewers can navigate.
Rubbing/Loving projects – labor-intensive works in which Suh covers the surfaces of meaningful homes with paper and rubs them with graphite or colored pencil, capturing their textures as fragile “paper memories.” The exhibition features Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–22) – a life-sized graphite impression of the interior of Suh’s childhood house in Korea – alongside a similar rubbing of a traditional house in Gwangju . These ghostly impressions preserve the physical essence of places that hold personal and collective history, embodying the idea that memories can be recorded in the very fabric (or paper) of architecture.
Throughout Walk the House, Suh’s artistic vision turns the gallery into a contemplative space where personal memory meets shared experience. Visitors wander through luminous fabric hallways that once belonged in the artist’s New York or Seoul residences, gaze upon floor-to-ceiling pencil rubbings that carry the imprint of long-ago living rooms, and encounter videos and drawings that meditate on the meaning of home in a rapidly changing world . As one curator observes, Suh uses the concept of home as “a departure point for… rich interrogations into the workings of memory, processes of migration…, the negotiation of self as you enter into a new society and how the places we have experienced… shape us” . In other words, the exhibition’s conceptual framework is grounded in Suh’s enduring focus on memory, home, space, and identity – inviting everyone who walks through to consider how their own environments and journeys have defined them.
Tate Modern’s Hyundai Commission Series: A Platform for Global Art
The Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern is an annual program that has, since 2015, given international artists an opportunity to transform the museum’s colossal Turbine Hall with new site-specific installations. It was launched as part of a ten-year partnership between Tate and Hyundai Motor, conceived to bring ambitious contemporary art to a broad public in this unique industrial space . Each autumn, the Turbine Hall becomes the stage for a single monumental artwork – and over the years these commissions have become highlights of London’s art calendar, attracting millions of visitors and critical acclaim . From Kara Walker’s spectacular 13-meter tall fountain exploring colonial history to Anicka Yi’s eerie floating “biological” machines populating the air , the Hyundai Commission has produced some of the most bold and memorable artworks of the past decade. Artists from all over the world – including Mexico’s Abraham Cruzvillegas (2015), France’s Philippe Parreno (2016), Denmark’s SUPERFLEX collective (2017), Cuba’s Tania Bruguera (2018), Ghana’s El Anatsui (2023), and South Korea’s Mire Lee (2024) – have reimagined the Turbine Hall in radically different ways . Originally slated to run through 2025, the partnership’s success led Hyundai and Tate to extend the series into the 2030s , ensuring that this platform for creative experimentation will continue to inspire and challenge audiences for years to come.
Do Ho Suh’s role within this story is a fitting chapter. While Walk the House is a standalone survey exhibition (hosted in Tate’s galleries rather than the Turbine Hall), it is very much part of Tate’s Hyundai-backed celebration of global contemporary art. In fact, Suh’s show is billed as the first Genesis (Hyundai) art initiative in Europe – underscoring the ongoing collaboration between Tate Modern and the Hyundai family of brands. Like the Turbine Hall commissions, Walk the House creates an immersive, site-specific experience that engages viewers on themes of space, memory and society. Suh’s focus on the immigrant experience and the idea of carrying one’s home dovetails with the Hyundai Commission’s ethos of cross-cultural dialogue and “new ways to experience art” beyond traditional boundaries . In the broader history of the Hyundai Commission series, Suh’s participation reinforces its core purpose: bringing diverse voices to one of the world’s great modern art museums, and transforming that museum into a place where personal stories and global issues meet. Through Suh’s poignant fabric homes and memory-infused installations, Tate Modern continues to fulfill the Hyundai Commission’s mission of engaging audiences with art that reflects the world we live in – and the homes we carry within us.
Sources: Tate Modern exhibition text ; Tate/Genesis press release ; Stir magazine feature on Walk the House ; Artnet News ; Tate Modern & Hyundai partnership announcements .