Home, Nowhere and Everywhere
Writer: Wenqiu Zhang
Date: 25/05/2024
Keywords: environmental impact/ consumer culture/ food production/ colonialism
What does “home” look like in our imaginations today? Is it, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang in Our House, a quiet place bathed in sunlight where cats rest peacefully on the windowsill? Or has it become, as Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros sing in Home, something that is no longer tied to any one place—“Home is wherever I’m with you”—a bond defined by relationships and promises rather than physical locations? Or is it the call of one’s homeland carried in the blood, like the faithful return and longing in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama? Now on view at Tate Modern, the solo exhibition The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House by Korean artist Do Ho Suh invites us to rethink these questions with every step we take. Moving through corridors where the real and the imagined blur, we are asked to consider: is home a place, a relationship, or an endless act of imagination? Bringing together three decades of the artist’s life and work in Seoul, New York, and London, this exhibition reflects Suh’s ongoing exploration of what “home” truly means. Through large-scale installations, sculptures, films, and drawings, he weaves together personal memories, cultural identity, and architectural space, creating a vision of home that is both specific and abstract—at once deeply personal and quietly universal.
Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013-2022. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia,
Sydney, Australia. Photography by Sebastian Mrugalski. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London. © Do Ho Suh
步入展厅，一座宏大的纸质建筑装置首先映入眼帘。这部名为Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home(2013-2022)的作品，由艺术家将宣纸塑形在他童年时所居住的韩屋上，用石墨拓印并将其留在房屋上将近一年，直到其被传统的建筑的木质建材所浸透染色。加斯东·巴舍拉在《空间的诗学》中写到：“由于有了家宅，我们的很多回忆都安顿下来，而且如果家宅稍微精致一些，如果它有地窖和阁楼、角落和走廊，我们的回忆所具有的藏身处就会被更好地刻画出来。我们终生都在梦想中回到那些地方。”在巴舍拉的笔下，他不仅仅将house视为单纯的物理容器，也不仅将home视为情感依附的抽象概念，他强调房屋作为具体的物质空间，在人们经历一定的居住体验和活动下，能够转化为承载人们记忆的心理空间。韩屋的木质梁柱、低矮的屋檐、字体依旧清晰可见的牌匾以及彼此连通却又保持疏离的空间布局，恰恰为徐道获的童年记忆提供了这样一处“藏身之所”。如同徐道获阐释这个作品的名字，R和L在汉语中是同义词，如果用韩语写loving和rubbing，它们是同一个词汇。这部作品同时包含了物理意义上传统技法和工艺的展现以及精神意义上艺术家对“家”这个概念的情感体现。它既是艺术家对幼时居所的重返和见证，也承载着他对这种传统建筑快速被高楼大厦所取代进而消失的失落，以及对逝去的光阴和古老建筑的祭奠。
Stepping into the gallery, visitors are immediately greeted by monumental paper architectural installation. Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–2022) was created by the artist through a meditative and painstaking process: he shaped delicate mulberry paper over his childhood hanok home, gently rubbing graphite across its surface and leaving the paper in place for nearly a year, allowing the traditional timber structure to slowly imprint and stain it. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “Thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.” For Bachelard, the house is neither merely a physical container nor simply an abstract symbol of emotional belonging—it is a material space that, through lived experience, transforms into a vessel for psychological memory. The hanok’s wooden beams, its low-slung eaves, the still-legible calligraphic plaque, and the interconnected yet carefully distanced spatial layout offered precisely such a refuge for Suh’s childhood memories. As the artist explains, in Korean, the sounds r and l are interchangeable, and the words “rubbing” and “loving” share the same pronunciation. This poetic slippage imbues the work with a double meaning: it is at once a tactile exercise in traditional craft and a deeply personal expression of emotional attachment. Through this process, Suh not only returns to and bears witness to his childhood home but also mourns the loss of these vernacular architectures, rapidly disappearing under the pressure of urban development. It becomes both an act of remembrance and a quiet ritual of farewell.
My Homes, 2010, thread embedded in cotton paper
然而，在全球化流动性加剧的今天，这样的“回归”变得愈发复杂。在纸屋一旁墙壁悬挂的纸上刺绣作品 My Homes（2010）正是艺术家本人试图对这一困境的作出的回应。这件作品以缠绕的丝线将自由行走的房屋等奇异想象缝合在一起，呈现出一座座随时准备启程的移动之家，这样的图像不禁令人联想到动画电影《飞屋环游记》中那座被五彩气球托举的房屋——一个承载着主人公全部回忆和未竟梦想的移动空间。在电影中，房屋挣脱了物理世界的束缚，在空中飞行。同样，在My Homes中，家不再是固定不变的栖居所，而是形态各异的承载体，以轻盈、可携带的形态被重新定义，诉说着艺术家本人不断迁居的经历以及对“可移动家园”的想象。五颜六色的丝线让孩童简笔画式的房子在纸上长出了马儿在风中奔跑时飘逸的鬃毛，灵活的双腿从本该扎根于土地的房屋根基出伸出，轻盈的降落伞将屋顶高高悬起......空间对记忆的承载，从沉重转向了漂浮，从坚实的物理结构转向了一种介于现实与想象之间的“可移动的家”。 在这里，家是一顶可以随身携带的帐篷，一个自由翱翔的热气球，或许不再需要固定的砖石，而是在缠绕的线迹中获得了新的可居性。
However, in today’s era of heightened global mobility, such notions of “return” have grown increasingly complex. Positioned beside the paper house installation, the embroidered work My Homes (2010) stands as the artist’s poetic response to this very dilemma. Using brightly colored threads, Suh stitches together a whimsical collection of freely wandering houses, each appearing ready to embark on its own journey. These fantastical structures immediately call to mind the animated film Up, where a house buoyed by vibrant balloons drifts across the sky—an airborne vessel carrying the protagonist’s cherished memories and unfinished dreams. In both Suh’s work and the film, the house liberates itself from the constraints of physical geography, transforming into a vessel of movement and longing. In My Homes, the house is no longer a static site of dwelling but a fluid, transportable container—lightweight, portable, and endlessly reconfigurable. This visual language reflects the artist’s own experience of perpetual relocation and his imaginative vision of a “nomadic home.” Delicate threads animate the childlike, sketch-like houses with the energy of wild horses galloping in the wind. From what would traditionally be a house’s stable foundation, agile legs extend, ready to roam. Parachutes delicately lift rooftops into the air, suspending the structures between flight and settlement. In this transformation, the house shifts from a heavy repository of memory to something weightless and transient—from a solid architectural form to a liminal, in-between space that hovers between reality and imagination. Here, home becomes a tent one can carry on their back, a balloon floating freely in the sky. No longer bound by bricks and stone, it finds a new sense of habitability within the tangled threads—a home not fixed in place, but woven through journeys, memories, and the ever-changing contours of lived experience.
Home Within Home (Scale 1-9), 2025 (left)
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, polyester, stainless steel, 410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm (right)
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, polyester, stainless steel, 410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm (right)
在展览的第一个空间中，与传统韩屋并置，同样规格宏大的、捕获观众视线的另一件作品名为Nest/s (2024)，这也是艺术家最新的大型装置作品。这部作品呈现出一条长长的走廊式空间，墨绿、绛紫、粉、藏蓝等沉静的颜色在带有易碎脆弱感的网纱材质下营造出淡然、柔软、怀旧的情感氛围。在与这件作品互动时，观众不仅可以围绕它移动，还能直接穿梭其间。这种空间体验介于虚拟和真实之间——房间的结构、家具、电器等细节以丝线精确勾勒，却因材料的透明性而显得虚无飘渺，像是被时间稀释的记忆投影。这些由不同颜色的房间组成的“记忆隧道”，编织了徐道获在首尔、纽约、柏林、伦敦所居住过的一系列房间。通过这种打破时间和地域限制，将各地的房子们用轻盈的方式连接在一起的做法，艺术家将儿时在画本上绘制的“移动之家”的心愿转换为实体。这不仅仅是艺术家个人的回忆，来自世界不同国度的观众似乎都能从这些半透明的细密雕花、空调外机、角落插座、朦胧窗棱找到自己记忆中“家”的影子。
In the same gallery space, juxtaposed against the traditional Korean hanok, stands another equally monumental and visually arresting installation—Nest/s (2024), the artist’s latest large-scale work. This piece unfolds as a long, corridor-like structure, where muted tones of forest green, deep crimson, pale pink, and midnight blue are softened by the delicate, translucent fabric of fine mesh. The fragile, diaphanous material evokes a quiet, gentle, and nostalgic atmosphere. Unlike static installations, Nest/s invites viewers not only to move around it but also to pass directly through its interior. This spatial experience hovers between the virtual and the real—architectural structures, household furniture, and electrical appliances are meticulously outlined with thread, yet the transparency of the material renders them ephemeral, like memory traces diluted by the passage of time. This “tunnel of memories,” composed of interconnected rooms in varying hues, weaves together the domestic spaces where Do Ho Suh once lived—across Seoul, New York, Berlin, and London. By dissolving temporal and geographic boundaries and connecting distant homes through such a light and portable form, the artist transforms his childhood dream of a “movable home,” once drawn on sketchbooks, into a tangible reality. And yet, this installation speaks to more than the artist’s personal memories. Visitors from all over the world can find echoes of their own domestic pasts within the finely stitched window frames, air conditioning units, electrical outlets tucked in corners, and softly blurred doorways. Here, “home” becomes a shared, universal imprint—a space as fragile and transient as it is intimately familiar.
这种拼接式的呈现不同于Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home。如果说 Rubbing/Loving：Seoul Home中对传统韩屋的重塑是一场关于童年家园记忆的深情回返，那么 Nest/s则是一次艺术家基于自身的经验，关于离散身份与流动庇护所的当代表达，是离散个体不断被折叠、携带和重新展开的情感容器。在《家园》这本书中，艾莉森·布伦特写道：“家可以带来归属感，也可能带来疏离感；关于“家”的情感可以跨越全球，被联结到一个国家，或附着于一座房屋；家所承载的空间和想象，对于人们身份的建构起着核心作用。”在 Nest/s 这部作品里，这种关于“家”的情感被具象为一处处漂浮的“巢穴”，它们没有坚实的墙体和稳定的基址，拒绝提供任何坚实的庇护，只以柔软的纱网和脆弱的线条勾勒出庇护所的轮廓。这部作品的轻盈与不确定，直接映射了徐道获自身跨越文化和地理边界的身份经验。从上世纪90年代初离开韩国赴美求学、长期生活于纽约和伦敦，他的生活轨迹早已超越了某个地域的固定认同。同时，这部作品所体现的 “不稳定性”也正是对当代离散经验的深刻隐喻——家园不再是一个终极的归宿，而成为了一个不断在想象中建构、在现实中丧失的未完成状态。
This fragmented spatial composition stands in sharp contrast to Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home. If the latter is a heartfelt return to childhood memories, a tender reconstruction of a once-familiar homeland, then Nest/s offers a distinctly contemporary reflection on diasporic identity and the notion of a mobile sanctuary—a vessel of emotions that can be folded, carried, and unfolded again with each new displacement. In her book Home, Alison Blunt writes, “Home can be feelings of belonging or of alienation; feelings of home can be stretched across the world, connected to a nation or attached to a house; the spaces and imaginaries of home are central to the construction of people’s identities.” In Nest/s, this complex emotional landscape materializes as a series of floating “nests.” These shelters have no solid walls, no fixed foundations; they refuse to offer permanent refuge. Instead, they are delicately outlined in fragile mesh and fine thread—soft, impermanent contours of protection. The lightness and uncertainty of these structures directly mirror Do Ho Suh’s own lived experience of crossing cultural and geographical boundaries. Since leaving Korea in the early 1990s to study abroad, and later settling between New York and London, his life has long surpassed any singular, fixed sense of belonging. At the same time, the “instability” embodied in Nest/s becomes a powerful metaphor for the contemporary diasporic condition—where home is no longer an ultimate destination, but a state of constant becoming : always imagined, repeatedly lost, and forever incomplete.
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, polyester, stainless steel, 410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm
穿过这条梦幻的长廊，是另一间半透明的房屋。这部名为 Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul的作品由艺术家在2024年创作完成，同样也是在Tate Modern首次展出。在这部作品中，徐道获一比一复刻还原了他在伦敦居住的家，这些还原甚至包含了乳白色透明房帐上开关插座、电灯风扇的高度和具体位置。 显然，这种高度精确的复刻不是为了实用，而是为了通过物理细节唤起身体层面的记忆回应。但这座“完美之家”真的是归属的终点吗？半透明的墙体和轻盈的织物，让家的实体感被彻底消解，它既是理想中的庇护所，也是无法真正抵达的幻象。
Through the dreamy corridor lies another translucent house. This work, titled Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, was completed by the artist in 2024 and is being exhibited for the first time at Tate Modern. In this installation, Do Ho Suh has meticulously recreated, at a one-to-one scale, the home he lived in while residing in London—even down to the precise positions and heights of light switches, power sockets, ceiling fans, and lamps rendered in milky translucent fabric. Clearly, this level of architectural precision is not aimed at functionality but rather at triggering a somatic response through the physicality of remembered details. Yet, one cannot help but ask: is this “perfect home” truly the endpoint of belonging? With its semi-transparent walls and weightless fabric, the materiality of home dissolves entirely—it exists simultaneously as an idealized sanctuary and an unreachable mirage.
Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024, polyester, stainless steel, 455 x 575 x 1237 cm | courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London | image by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh (left)
Smallest Occupiable Shelter in collaboration with kolonsport, 2024，Polyester and polyamide（right)
Smallest Occupiable Shelter in collaboration with kolonsport, 2024，Polyester and polyamide（right)
在这场展览另一间展厅展出的是艺术家与建筑、工程、人类学、生物学领域的专家们共同合作的进行中项目The Bridge Project。在这里，观众仿佛置身于一个尚未完成的思想实验现场。这里没有精致纱帐和柔和光影，也没有可以穿行的空间装置，取而代之的，是一间更像未来实验室的开放式工作坊，影像、草图、技术图纸、环境数据和未完成的模型错落其间。展厅的顶部悬挂着一件名为Smallest Occupiable Shelter 的作品，这是艺术家与服饰品牌KOLON SPORT合作制造的救生衣，它内置应急食品、太阳能电池板、GPS 追踪系统等装置。这件作品的概念来源于艺术家对一段旅程的幻想，这段旅途从他的家乡起始，将北冰洋视为终极归宿。在这场关于生存的极端想象中，徐道获将“家”的概念进一步物化为一套精密的个人生存系统。在展览的结束部分，徐道获通过影像对这个从1999年就已经开始的项目进行阐释。他设想在一座连接首尔、纽约和伦敦的桥梁中心，安置一个象征性的“完美家园”。通过精确测量三地距离， 他将“完美家园”的位置设定在不属于任何国家的北冰洋中点——一个现实中远离人类居住、却充满复杂主权争议和生态隐患的地点。这一假想引发了关于领土、环境破坏以及全球家园危机的深层问题：当现实中无数家园正在消失，“完美家园”是否早已成为一种无法兑现的矛盾承诺?
In another gallery space, the exhibition presents The Bridge Project, an ongoing collaboration between the artist and experts in architecture, engineering, anthropology, and biology. Here, visitors find themselves not in a polished exhibition but in what feels like the site of an unfinished thought experiment. Gone are the delicate fabric walls and soft, filtered light; instead, the space resembles a futuristic laboratory—filled with scattered videos, sketches, technical diagrams, environmental data, and unfinished models. Suspended from the ceiling is Smallest Occupiable Shelter, a work developed in collaboration with the clothing brand KOLON SPORT. This survival vest incorporates emergency food supplies, a solar panel, a GPS tracking system, and other essential devices. The concept originated from the artist’s imagined journey—a journey that begins in his homeland and sees the Arctic Ocean as its destination. In this extreme meditation on survival, Suh radically materializes the concept of “home” as a precise, self-contained life-support system. In the final section of the exhibition, a video work reflects on this project, which has been in development since 1999. Suh envisions placing a symbolic “perfect home” at the center of a conceptual bridge connecting Seoul, New York, and London. Based on the precise calculation of distances between these cities, he situates this ideal home in the geographical midpoint of the Arctic Ocean—a place that belongs to no nation but is entangled in geopolitical disputes and ecological crisis. This speculative vision raises profound questions about territory, environmental degradation, and the global housing crisis. As homes disappear across the world at an alarming rate, has the idea of a “perfect home” already become an unattainable, paradoxical promise?
从一处处亲手丈量、细致缝制的“小家”，到一座横跨地缘与想象的宏大“家园”，徐道获的创作旅程，始终围绕着一个未竟的问题徘徊：在不断迁徙、流动与分离的时代，我们究竟如何安置那份关于“家”的情感？他所构筑的那些半透明房屋，虽然源自自身的居所记忆，却能够让无数观者在其中看见了自己曾经的家的轮廓。这些所谓的“小家”，也并不局限于个人，而是成为了集体记忆和时代漂泊感的缩影。当他的目光最终投向北冰洋那片无人之境时，“家”的尺度也随之拓展至人类共同的生存场域。正如学者唐娜·哈拉维在《Staying with the Trouble》中所提出的：“学会在受损的地球上共同生存和死亡，将更有利于我们形成一种思维方式，从而为构建更宜居的未来提供途径。”徐道获的艺术，正是这种“不执着于回归，而是在周遭环境的变化之中寻找栖居”的生动实践。
From the delicately hand-measured and meticulously stitched personal homes to the vast and speculative vision of a universal home spanning both geography and imagination, Do Ho Suh’s creative journey continually circles around an unresolved question: In an era of constant migration, movement, and separation, how do we find a place—both physical and emotional—to settle our longing for “home”? Though drawn from his own personal memories of domestic spaces, Suh’s translucent architectural forms become shared vessels in which countless viewers recognize the fragile contours of their own past homes. These so-called small homes are not confined to private recollection; they stand as monuments to collective memory and the pervasive sense of displacement in our time. When Suh’s gaze ultimately turns toward the uninhabited expanse of the Arctic Ocean, the concept of home expands once more—this time to encompass the shared existential space of all humanity. As Donna Haraway suggests in Staying with the Trouble, “Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures.” Suh’s art is a vivid enactment of this principle—not a nostalgic search for return, but an ongoing negotiation of how to dwell meaningfully within the shifting landscapes of our fractured world.
又或许，家从来就不是一座可以最终抵达的建筑，而是一种被反复召唤、不断想象，在行走与漂泊中临时安放的情感场所。在徐道获织就的那些轻盈空间和未竟桥梁中，我们看到的，正是这一场关于家园、记忆与未来的无尽试探与温柔抵抗。
Perhaps, home has never been a final destination or a structure to be reached, but rather an emotional space—one that is endlessly summoned, continuously imagined, and temporarily settled amidst movement and exile. In the delicate spaces and unfinished bridges crafted by Do Ho Suh, what we witness is precisely this ongoing experiment—an open-ended search for belonging, a gentle resistance against loss, and a tender rehearsal for futures yet to come.