Do Ho Suh is a Korean-born artist, now working in London, whose work uses the spatial medium of sculpture to explore questions of time and identity. Inside of his sculpture Nest/s, currently on display as part of Tate Modern’s Walk the House exhibit, the ghostly presence of the past invades the present space. Through his semi-transparent “fabric architectures”, built by wrapping polyester mesh around metal wires, one can see beyond into the gallery space, as though these meticulously detailed interiors were only a colourful echo of another, more real space. Fabric light switches, door handles, and even fire extinguishers, in their formal banality, provoke an unconscious desire to touch them as though they actually were the instruments we recognise them to represent.
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024
The past is irrevocably connected to the present, through memory as a vital force, as well as through history as a physical presence. Yet the past is always impossible to reach, impalpable, however much we feel its presence. Suh’s art achieves the same effect. He plays on connection and separation, at once connecting us to a resonant past, while separating us aesthetically from it. We are able to appreciate his home-like spaces, without actually living in them – home becomes an aesthetic object, alienated from our habitual perspectives. For Suh, this separation is necessary for the creation of an art object. As a student, he created acrylic cakes in order to explore the line between the use value of an object and its aesthetic value, and he wrote of them, “if they’d been too successful as sculptures then the beholder would have wanted to consume them.”
The same exploration is borne out in Nest/s, at once inviting us in to consider the art as home, but creating enough separation to force a questioning of what this category of “home” really means. When I was growing up, home changed often for me, following my father’s work from London to Los Angeles, and then back to England. My childhood was broken up into fragments of memory shared between three places, but these memories weren’t static objects – they animated the new places that I was contending with. I saw familiar faces in strangers, and I felt an old home in the new one. When Do Ho Suh writes that “home started to exist for me once I no longer had it”, I read into this the way that my separation from home enabled me to think more fully about what home actually means.
This experience of defamiliarization is striking in Suh’s work, where time isn’t static and linear, but accumulative. Suh amasses time-spaces, be that through the jumbled corridor of Nest/s, or the insertion of the artist’s hanok home in Seoul into the middle of his student housing block in the resin sculpture Home Within Home. In Suh’s work, the past is a place we carry with us.
Do Ho Suh, Home Within Home (prototype), 2009-2011.
While my own experiences of displacement resonate for me in Walk the House, and my own experience of displacement is a voluntary one, I cannot help but feel a universal quality to Suh’s explorations. Even without spatial displacement, we are all always temporally displaced – our experience is necessarily plural and accumulative, as time passes and memories grow. In the way that the past invades the present, in pieces such as Home Within Home and the jumble of appliances in Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, we understand that there is no privileged place outside of time from which we can look back on it. When standing in Nest/s, any single point is just as transitional as the next, but all are equally interrelated. Our memories are always shaping our experiences, which in turn form new memories, in a vicious cycle of remembrance and loss.
Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home, London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024
Although Suh’s work is never fully rooted in a single place or time, he never arrives at ambivalence or relativism. Instead, these time-places, in their displacement from their origins, take on a resonant significance that isn’t hierarchical, but personal. Only by moving through Nest/s can we appreciate each simulated room, divided by the colour of the fabric, but also by the unique details of each. Each room evokes a diversity of memory that animates them, only to move into the next with the memory of the previous one still in mind. What is lost, what carries over, and what is gained, all constitute Nest/s truncated experience of transition, covering a lifetime in the course of a corridor. Separation and displacement, far from challenging the category of ‘home’ for Do Ho Suh, underscores its importance to the individual and to the community.
Certain groups are attempting to define for themselves what home is, and who isn’t welcome there.
Work like Do Ho Suh’s is all the more important in a time of growing political polarisation and social atomisation. Memory and Home, staples of Suh’s work, can no longer be considered neutral categories. As we’ve seen this past week, with the far right’s “Operation Raise the Colours”, certain groups are attempting to define for themselves what home is, and who isn’t welcome there. Walk the House, for me, is dealing with the same contradiction. In questioning what home is, and where the ‘perfect home’ might be found, Suh makes us think hard about the past of our country, not as an isolated place, but one entangled with the mesh of worlds both past and present. Distinctions between people are messy and blurred, like the jumbled colours of Nest/s, and although some may fall on the ‘right’ side of the line for now, we should be more than careful about drawing a line in the first place. If we want to tackle the issues that face us as a society, we cannot only look to our house, but all the others which permeate it. This includes taking responsibility for the legacy of colonialism, something conveniently erased from many people’s memories of this country’s history. As we confront the early stages of fascist populism, easy answers are winning elections. To create a future that is truly better for everyone, we need the sort of all-encompassing historical view that Do Ho Suh’s artwork embodies. We cannot stand by while others rip threads from the “fabric architecture” of our history.
Work Cited
Nabila Abdel Nabi, and Dina Akhmadeeva, editors. Do Ho Suh: The Genesis Exhibition Book. Tate Publishing, 2025.
Leave a comment