The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House 2025

Tate Modern presents a landmark exhibition of Do Ho Suh’s practice, marking the first major solo showing of his work in London for a generation. The artist invites visitors to explore his large-scale installations, sculptures, videos and drawings, asking questions about home, memory, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us. The exhibition surveys the breadth and depth of Suh’s practice over the last three decades, spanning­ locations including Seoul, New York, and London – the three cities he has called home, and featuring new site-specific works on display for the first time.

The exhibition’s title ‘Walk the House’ is drawn from a Korean expression Suh heard during the construction of his childhood home in Seoul referring to the hanok – a traditional Korean house that could be disassembled, transported and reassembled at a new site, a process imagined as ‘walking the house’. Reflecting this idea of a transportable home, Suh’s immersive works examine the relationship between architecture, the body and memory, as well as how we carry multiple places with us across space and time. The artist has stated: ‘The space I’m interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one. For me, ‘space’ is that which encompasses everything.’

Suh welcomes viewers to fill his works both physically with their presence and psychologically with their inner worlds, inviting visitors to walk through his fabric architectures – translucent 1:1 scale replicas of spaces in which he has lived and worked. These include the ambitious new installation Nest/s 2024, which colourfully weaves together rooms, corridors and entryways from buildings across Seoul, New York, London and Berlin to form one continuous, impossible architecture. Also presented for the first time is Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul 2024, an outline of the artist’s present home in London filled with sewn architectural features from domestic spaces in which he and his family have previously lived, such as doorknobs, light switches and electrical sockets.

Major installations such as Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home 2013-22 – created through the labour-intensive process of rubbing the surfaces of buildings with graphite or coloured pencil – reflect on how spaces can bear witness to both personal and collective memory. In the newly reconfigured Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater 2012, rubbing becomes a way to reflect on the violent aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980, asking what memories spaces might carry against the grain of official histories. Outside the entrance to the exhibition visitors are surrounded by Who Am We? 2000, a wallpaper made up of tens of thousands of tiny portrait photographs collected from sources including school yearbooks – an early example of the artist’s exploration into the relationship between individual and group identity. ‘I was challenging people’s ability to see differences’, Suh notes.

Alongside these expansive installations, the exhibition brings together works on paper created between 1999 and 2025 which allow Suh to create portable versions of built environments. The evocative Staircase 2016, made by dissolving a gelatine tissue scale model into wet paper pulp, translates the three-dimensional form onto a two-dimensional plane. The artist’s intricate and vibrant thread drawings explore subjects to which Suh has repeatedly returned throughout his career, including impermanence, the cyclicality of time, and the interconnectedness of relationships. Much of Suh’s work is conceptually rooted in his training in Korean ink painting, which limits the painter’s control of the image due to the instantaneous embedding of ink into paper’s fibres.

Tate Modern also presents two of Suh’s video works – Robin Hood Gardens 2018 and Dong In Apartments 2022- which focus on 20th-century housing blocks in London and Daegu ahead of their demolition. Addressing the rapidly changing architectural fabric of cities, they consider the relationship between a building and a home. Using advanced technology and processes such as photogrammetry – the stitching together of images to produce a digital model of the physical world – and flythrough camera techniques, Suh engages with the built environment as a living organism, a witness to the traces left behind by past inhabitants. Architectural modelling software and 3D printing are used to merge two of Suh’s previous homes in Home Within Home 2025, exploring the cultural differences he experienced upon moving from Seoul to the US. The exhibition culminates in a space dedicated to Suh’s ongoing Bridge Project – an interrogation of an impossible ‘perfect home’. Created in collaboration with specialists in architecture, engineering, anthropology and biology, it grapples with how an imagined, hypothetical set of structures intersect with real-world social, political and ecological issues.

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is in partnership with Genesis. It is supported by The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh Supporters Circle and Tate Members. The exhibition is co-curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Senior Curator, International Art (Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational) and Dina Akhmadeeva, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern). The creation and repurposing of artworks in the exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of Genesis.

Tate Members get unlimited free entry to all Tate exhibitions. Become a Member at tate.org.uk/members. Everyone aged 16-25 can visit all Tate exhibitions for £5 by joining Tate Collective. To join for free, visit tate.org.uk/tate-collective.

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Listings information
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
1 May – 19 October 2025
Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG
Open daily 10.00–18.00
Tickets available at tate.org.uk and +44(0)20 7887 8888
Free for Members. Join at tate.org.uk/members
Follow @Tate #DoHoSuh

About Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh (b.1962, Seoul) studied Korean Painting at Seoul National University before receiving a B.F.A. in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale University in 1997. Solo exhibitions of his work have been shown at institutions including Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2024); the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2019); V&A, London (2019); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2018); ARoS, Aarhus (2018); The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2018); Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2018); Towada Art Center, Towada (2018); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2018); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2012-2013) and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2012). Suh has also participated in the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019); Singapore Biennial (2016); Gwangju Biennale (2012); Liverpool Biennial (2010); International Architecture Exhibition, Venice (2010); International Istanbul Biennial (2003); Biennial of Sydney (2002); and represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001).

About Genesis and Genesis Art Initiatives
Genesis is a global automotive brand that aims to deliver the highest standards of performance, design, safety, and innovation while looking towards a more sustainable future. Reflecting a commitment to authenticity, Genesis seeks to foster dialogue on issues that transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, inspiring people to discover the profound through the arts. Genesis Art Initiatives supports institutions and visionaries with an understanding of contemporary challenges and timeless values. The initiatives include The Genesis Facade Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a multi-year partnership presenting newly commissioned artworks on the niches of The Met’s main entrance facade, and The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House at Tate Modern, a comprehensive exhibition of the prominent artist. Visit www.genesis.com/art.html or follow @genesis_worldwide #GenesisArtInitiatives to learn more about our partnerships and programs.

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Edited by Nabila Abdel Nabi and Dina Akhmadeeva with Amie Corry
Published May 2025, Paperback £35
Published to accompany Tate Modern’s major exhibition, this beautifully designed and illustrated survey further enriches our experience of Do Ho Suh’s remarkable body of work. The book includes a conversation between Suh and Canadian artist Janice Kerbel, with additional contributions from Sean Anderson, Sarah Fine, Monica Juneja, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dylan Trigg, and Kira Wainstein.

Smartify Audio Guide
£5
The exhibition is accompanied by a self-led smartphone audio tour, including audio description and British Sign Language options and featuring contributions from Do Ho Suh, the exhibition’s curators Nabila Abdel Nabi and Dina Akhmadeeva, and Tate Modern’s Senior Art Installation Manager, Adam Wozniak.

Related events
Artist Talk: Do Ho Suh
21 June 2025, 18:30-20:00
Starr Cinema, Tate Modern; £15/£13 concessions
Join Do Ho Suh for a unique talk in response to his Tate Modern exhibition. Suh’s creative practice spans a wide range of media including drawing, film, and sculpture, and explores themes of memory, belonging, movement, and the concept of home in physical and imagined spaces. Having lived in various cities, the artist approaches these themes through a transnational lens.

Past the Concrete: Screening & Discussion
25 September 2025, 18:30-20:00
Starr Cinema, Tate Modern; £15/£13 concessions
Join us for an evening of storytelling, creativity and reflection in response to The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. The V&A East Robin Hood Young Producers invite you to a powerful showcase of film and discussion exploring the layered history of Robin Hood Gardens, a former housing estate in Poplar and home of many communities. Do Ho Suh made a film visualising the estate’s bold brutalist architecture ahead of its demolition. This event offers a personal look at life in the area through oral histories, poetry, and visual responses from the people who lived there.

Tate Modern Late
26 September 2025, 18.00–22.00
Tate Modern will open after-hours to celebrate The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. The evening will feature music, workshops, talks, film screenings and performances inspired by Suh’s exhibition, exploring themes of home, identity and memory.