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Not a House, but a Memory: Review of Do Ho Suh’s ‘Walk the House’ Exhibition at Tate Modern.
What happens when the place that defines you vanishes, not suddenly, but slowly, invisibly, until its absence becomes inescapable? The threat of losing our home, our ground, our routine, remains unthinkable until it becomes real. Displacement, whether emotional and psychological caused by migration, cultural transition, and memory, leaves an enduring mark. Once it takes root, the displaced rarely feel at home again. The memory remains, but home is more than a structure; it is a tether that holds our networks together. This sentiment is reflected in the exhibition Walk the House at Tate Modern. Korean artist Do Ho Suh, whose practice has spanned over three decades, has gained international recognition for his deeply poetic explorations of home, identity, and migration. His work resonates widely in contemporary art, offering a delicate meditation on the fragile nature of belonging in an increasingly globalized world.
The show opens with several key works layered into the space, inviting the viewer into Suh’s personal worldview. One standout piece depicts colourful threads, embedded in delicate cotton paper, streaming from the figure. These strands embody memory and the passage of time. The Korean house motif recurs throughout the exhibition, rendered in transparent fabric and stitched with haunting precision. These architectural forms are blueprints of spaces remembered, imagined, and grieved.
Fig.1 Haunting Home, 2019, thread embedded in handmade cotton paper. © Do Ho Suh, courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London.
Suh’s work suggests that only through memory, or in death, do we have the time to reflect on our personal history. In this show, the final threads seem to lead toward absence: a white space, a void of sorts. But what happens when the place you thought would always exist disappears? This question echoes through the exhibition, particularly in works that emphasize fragility.The emotional and political climax of the show is Robin Hood Gardens, a film installation documenting the East London housing estate before its demolition as part of a wider local regeneration project. Suh captures the residue of domestic life with curtains still hanging, hallways echoing with silence. Despite protests from residents for preservation, the estate was demolished. It is a reminder that no home is too permanent to erase. Every home is vulnerable to time, to politics, to progress. The film serves as a spectral reminder of what was lost, a design of significance that future generations might have cherished, had it been preserved in full, only a fragment survives.
Fig.2 Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024. Installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul.
Despite this, Suh manages to translate the fragility and longing we associate with home into deeply resonant forms. His work asks us to consider: What is home to you? What does loss, or grief, look like in physical form? In a world shaped by displacement, whether political or environmental, these questions have never felt more urgent. Suh’s practice reimagines how we move through the world and the architectures we construct to hold our past and make sense of our future. What does a perfect home look like? In addressing this question, Suh compels us to revisit our roots.
The exhibition’s centrepiece is a life-size architectural installation rendered entirely in translucent fabric. Suspended in the gallery, it resembles a floating memory. Light switches, windows, and hinges are all precisely detailed, yet without weight. The space is visible through the walls. It is both too intimate to touch and too fragile to hold. Memory, like his materials, is translucent. It reveals both the outline and the absence of what once was. His migratory life, from Korea to the United States and beyond, reflects in the semi-permanence of his work. It is haunted by loss, yet always searching for presence.
Further along, we are granted access to Suh’s personal journals and sketches, never originally intended for public viewing. These documents reveal a mind deeply absorbed in how spaces are remembered and reimagined. We see dream homes modelled in detail: structures combining Korean Hanok traditions with Western kitchens on a Ferris wheel, bridges spanning continents. These speculative blueprints blend personal memory with collective longing. In this show, Suh pays homage to traditional Korean aesthetics while also crafting a global, diasporic vision of belonging. His works are not bound by geography. They instead occupy an emotional landscape: fragments of New York, London, Seoul, Vienna. His homes are accumulations of memory, yearning, and time.
While each installation, film, and drawing are compelling in its own right, the exhibition layout feels spatially compressed. The tightly packed displays occasionally overwhelm the subtlety of Suh’s practice. These works would benefit from more space, more silence, to feel the void. But even within the crowded installation, Suh’s message emerges clearly. Home is both a personal refuge and a political battleground. Suh’s work is a meditation on this impermanence. His translucent rooms are not destinations, they are thresholds. “Once you leave your first home,” Suh writes, “a perpetual sense of displacement and vulnerability sets in, even within the solid walls that protect you physically.” This sentiment captures the immigrant’s experience. It is the constant reaching for something that cannot be held, the reminder that home is both a return and a departure. For immigrants, refugees, and anyone who has ever lost a home, by force or by choice, this truth resonates. The longing never ceases. The dance between the fullness and absence of home is a necessary reminder that we can rebuild worlds from within us, shaping new places not just of shelter, but of belonging, memory, and hope.