A career-spanning retrospective exhibition of artist Do Ho Suh is coming to Tate Modern in May 2025.
Best known for his large-scale installations, the Korean-born, London-based artist will be offering a crowd-pleasing show with a number of “immersive” works that will explore the notion of the 'home' as well as themes of belonging, individuality, connection and disconnection.
Tate is billing the exhibition as "the first major solo showing of his work in London for a generation." It will certainly also be one of the most instagrammable of London’s exhibitions next summer based on the nature of the artist's eye-catching artistic practice.
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Highlights of The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House will include brand new installations which have been created especially for this exhibition at Tate Modern. They will be seen alongside some of his most famous early large-scale works and his very famous life-size replicas of his past homes.
Suh asks timely and meaningful questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us. He wants visitors to this show to ponder on whether home is a place, a feeling, or an idea?
There'll be a particular focus on work created in relation to the cities of Seoul, New York, and London — the three cities he has called home.
In fact, visitors will be able to wander through his fabric architectures which are translucent 1:1 scale replicas of spaces in which the artist has lived and worked. Highlights will include the ambitious new installation Nest/s 2024, which colourfully weaves together corridors and entryways, and Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul 2024.
Perfect Home is made of an outline of the artist’s present home in London, filled with brightly coloured architectural features, including doorknobs, light switches and electrical sockets, that playfully trace the domestic spaces the artist and his family have previously lived in. It has never been seen publicly before.
The exhibition’s title Walk the House is another nod to the theme of the home, and is drawn from a Korean expression referring to the hanok — a house that can theoretically be disassembled, transported and reassembled at a new site.
It’s not going to be all huge pieces and artworks however. Also shown will be delicate works on paper, as well as a number of videos.
These videos will include Robin Hood Gardens 2018 and Dong In Apartments 2022, both of which feature photogrammetry, a technically detailed process which stitches together images to produce a digital model of the physical world. Suh hopes this process presents the built environment as a living organism, a witness to the traces left behind by past inhabitants.
The exhibition will culminate in a space dedicated to Do Ho Suh’s Bridge Project, an ongoing interrogation of the notion of a ‘perfect home’ which grapples with how this hypothetical space intersects with real-world social, political and ecological issues.
While tickets are not yet on sale for this show, it's just one of a really-quite-packed 2025 exhibition programme from Tate Modern.
Others to add to your to-visit list include a Leigh Bowery exhibition opening in February, and a show dedicated to Picasso’s The Three Dancers which will mark 100 years since the iconic painting was made.
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House opens at Tate Modern in London on 01 May 2025 and will run until 26 October.