When I moved from NYC to London in 2020, I was required to spend fourteen days in quarantine inside my new 20-sq-metre studio flat — a white stucco Victorian terrace in Bayswater, where currency exchange windows replace chicken shops and people like to say they live in Notting Hill.
Of course, without having stepped beyond the threshold, I didn’t yet know any of this. All I knew was that I was home — or something like it. Confined to a single room, I decided to start decorating. Instead of painting or throwing down rugs, I tackled the most quietly formative — yet transformative — detail I could think of. After counting the outlets and light switches, surprised that electricity in British bathrooms isn’t a thing, I took to the internet. Ordering a dozen brass-plated switch plates, just like the ones I remembered from New England, I was determined to make that shoebox feel like home.
In Korea, there’s an expression: to walk the house. It refers to dismantling a house so it can be transported and rebuilt elsewhere — a reminder that home is never static, but capable of moving with us. When I first read that Do Ho Suh’s retrospective — his first UK solo show in two decades — was titled The Genesis Exhibition: Walk the House, I assumed it had something to do with beginnings; an origin story. After all, Suh’s practice is all about coming home — or rather, bringing home with you, like a snail carrying its shell.
When he left his parents’ home in Seoul in 1991 to study at RISD in the USA, Suh wasn’t only seeking an education abroad but trying to step out from the shadow cast by the legacy of his father, a renowned ink painter. It was then that he began remaking the space where he had last slept — an act of preserving intimacy at a distance. Yet even that original space was already a reconstruction: a civilian-style scholar’s house from a palace complex rebuilt elsewhere.
Suh’s story also mirrors Seoul’s evolution. His family’s traditional home stood in stark contrast to a postwar city in flux, where low-rise neighborhoods were replaced by high-rise blocks to house a rapidly growing population. That tension between permanence, stability, and change runs throughout his work.
In the largest gallery on Tate’s second floor, a colossal structure takes centre stage: houses stitched together from translucent mesh, one room unfolding onto the next. Ghostly and meticulous, the spaces include every architectural detail: windows, doorframes, and millwork. The translucency of the textile is meant to convey the impression of a place rather than the place itself.
Suh is known for these delicate sculptures, but less so for his 2-dimensional thread drawings. Among the framed works on view is one depicting a figure, presumably Suh himself, running from a house that remains tethered to him by long strings, like an unsevered balloon. Despite his desire for escape, the figure remains bound to the forces that shaped him.
Another image depicts the façade of a house and the sliver of a human body standing in its shadow. Inspired by Suh’s New York City apartment building, the work references technical plans and drawings used in building construction. I am instantly reminded of the false façades at Leinster Gardens, a short walk from my old Bayswater flat, which were built by the Metropolitan Railway to disguise a gaping vent in the ground to release steam. Like much of his work, it is personal yet open-ended, inviting the viewer’s own memories to surface.
Two video works in the exhibition follow housing complexes in London and Daegu, South Korea. As the video pans through storeys of empty apartments, we catch glimpses of life through assemblages of furniture, decor, and personal belongings. Despite being privy to such intimate scenes, the camera pans steadily and indiscriminately with the unsentimental gaze of a property surveyor. Both sites, built in the mid-twentieth century and later marked for demolition, reveal how cities gain modernity and capacity but lose people, memory and texture in return.
London is everywhere in the exhibition. Not only is it where Suh lives now, and the scene of the retrospective, it’s a city that, like Seoul, finds itself in constant renewal and redevelopment. Forever rebuilding itself, it also erases what came before — yet fragments and filaments remain.
In Suh’s work, home is a moving target: something carried, chased, and reimagined. In the end, what we leave behind is often what we spend a lifetime returning to. Anyone who has left home — by choice or by necessity — knows the urge to rebuild it elsewhere, to remake its contours in memory or matter.
The title of the exhibit seemed to align perfectly with the theme, until I realised the “Genesis” part referred not only to creation, but to Genesis Motors, the luxury division of Hyundai Motor Group and the exhibition’s sponsor. Suddenly, the ethereal language of memory, portability, and belonging collides with the sleek world of automotive branding. It’s a jarring reminder that even the most tender meditations on home and displacement — just like the buildings slated for demolition — cannot escape corporate weight.
Standing inside the reproduction of Suh’s vacant house — a standalone mesh room filled with electrical fixtures replicated from homes Suh has lived in, all to scale and anatomically accurate — I am transported back to Bayswater and the uniquely intimate relationship that developed out of this thorough, micro engagement with the space.
Down to each wire and screw, the level of attentiveness is echoed in the utter cornucopia of fixtures. Ominipresent and often overlooked, they reveal so much: time period, global location, and human intervention. These architectural accessories are touchstones of daily life.
Suh’s exhibition makes clear that home is not simply a structure, but a vessel for the histories, habits, and cultures we carry across borders. Perhaps that’s the quiet truth behind the work: home resides in the small repetitions that ground us — not only electrically, but also emotionally. For this reason, belonging to somewhere can be reclaimed: perpetually rebuilt, socket by socket, switch by switch.
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Tate Modern
until 26 Oct. 2025
more info here
