Tate Modern’s The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House offered a sweeping survey of the artist Do Ho Suh’s thirty-year inquiry into “home.” The exhibition emerged from a partnership between Tate and the global automotive brand Genesis, reflecting a shared commitment to addressing the complexities of our time through diverse and experimental contemporary art practices. Bringing together textile architecture, drawing, video, and large-scale installations, the exhibition revealed how Suh reconstructs “home” through a constantly shifting set of media. Rather than a stable architectural unit, home here could be folded into portable dimensions, activated by bodily rubbing, entered as immersive space, or projected into an imagined future. Home is not a possession but a mediated relation, while space becomes mobile, tactile, and speculative—a way of being-in-the-world enacted through media.This mediation is rooted in Suh’s biography. Born in Seoul and trained in Korea, the United States, and having lived in the United Kingdom, Suh has long existed between places. Continual relocation across geographical spaces and architectural cultures transforms home from a fixed location into a mobile practice, from a site into a medium. Space, memory, and the body emerge not as themes but as mobility relations produced through media.Such mobility also invites a philosophical reading. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking,” dwelling can be understood as an interconnected relation of being, building, and thinking”1—not merely the possession of a house but a way of inhabiting the world. Suh does not depict houses; he constructs poetic modes of dwelling. Folding paper-based materials and scaled architectural models, rubbing architectural surfaces through hanji paper and graphite, building through textile structures, and imagining through video and digital modeling become existential tools—methods of carrying space, performing it with the body, immersing the body within it, and extending it beyond material limits.Walking through the exhibition, I was reminded of my own movements, growing up in a coastal town in northern China, moving to Beijing, then later to London for study and work. For those who live in motion, home is less a space we occupy than a relation we assemble, perform, and reinterpret. Suh’s practice becomes a toolbox for constructing home under conditions of mobility. The exhibition does more than show how we dwell; it proposes new ways of being in the world.Suh’s early training in Korean ink painting gave him a keen sensitivity to dimensional form, informing his interest in translating home into a portable medium. In Staircase (2016), he collapses a 3D architectural passage to a 2D plane, transforming a domestic corridor into a portable spatial imprint or foldable memory. Here, paper is not merely a representational surface but a medium that records habitation through contact, pressing, and folding—allowing architecture to be rebuilt through touch rather than with walls.Although Suh’s Home Within Home (2025) is not two-dimensional, it extends this inquiry by transforming home through mediated scale. Using 3D printing, Suh fused two of his former dwellings in Korea and the US into a single architectural model. A nineteenth-century student apartment building encases a traditional hanok; two cultural structures interlock, blur, and coexist. Rather than functioning as a miniature replica, the model demonstrates how scale can mediate identity and memory. Here, 3D printing is not simply a means of reproducing architecture but a form of mediated building: digital fabrication reshapes space by scaling, recombining, and re-encoding it as a transferable structure.Across these works, Suh redefines home as a flexible, mediated form: compressible, reproducible, and transferable. Home is no longer a fixed architectural entity but something one can carry, scale, share, and touch through media, continually reconstructing the idea of dwelling.If carrying compresses the home, rubbing temporalizes it, prolonging the duration of touch beyond the body. On the right side of the gallery stood Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–22), a full-scale hanok recreated through hanji paper and graphite rubbing, accompanied by a video showing its making. In the video, Suh covers the building with paper and repeatedly rubs its contours, leaving gestural traces. Here, performance and material contact do not merely mark surfaces but expand the relation between body and space through time. As Sara Ahmed observes, “Spaces can hence extend into bodies, just as bodies extend into space.”2 Space is not external but temporally shaped through embodied memory and habit.Suh’s video is not a secondary documentation; it extends the act of rubbing into a mediated performance that outlives the moment of touch. As noted by the performance theorist Philip Auslander, mediation does not simply record performance, but produces it.3 Through the moving image, rubbing shifts from intimate tactile inscription to a repeatable encounter. Repetition animates space, allowing it to “dance” with the body durationally.The camera thus transforms a momentary bodily action into a temporal archive, enabling viewers to re-experience the intimacy of rubbing. It rubs memory as much as surface, repositioning the viewer as a participant rather than a distant spectator. Thus, through the bodily rubbing of home and its secondary, time-based rubbing in video, the work does not exist solely on the surface of the hanji but within a mediated field of body, duration, and spectatorship, with home emerging as an intimate, personalized construction.If Seoul Home emphasizes a private domestic temporality, Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012) extends rubbing to collective memory and national politics. Referencing the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, the work was produced through blindfolded collective rubbing in which participants relied solely on touch to trace the building’s surfaces, leaving untouched blank areas that evoke silenced histories. Again, video activates these gestures: without mediation, the act would disappear. The camera turns private tactile motion into a public performance, with viewers becoming witnesses to a national rubbing. Mediation thus becomes a form of political inscription: not capturing history but performing it over time.Across these works, home becomes an editable temporal archive. Video turns installation into a living performance, collapsing temporal boundaries to allow viewers to symbolically participate in the rubbing. Individual and collective gestures inscribe, erase, and remake the meaning of home.Suh extends this logic in Dong In Apartments (2022), a film showing mid-century housing in Daegu slated for demolition. The film is comprised of a continuous flythrough shot of approximately twenty-one minutes, the prolonged duration inviting the viewer to dwell on the disappearance of urban memory. Unlike commemorative imagery, which seeks to preserve, this film reveals the impossibility of preservation. The moving image does not save memory but performs its erasure. Once heralds of modern progress, the focal buildings were destroyed under planning imperatives. Their disappearance mirrors South Korea’s postwar transformation: everyday hanok life gave way to high-rise apartments, while monumental sites such as Gyeongbokgung Palace were preserved. Constructed through photogrammetry and digital reconstruction, the work renders the building as a navigable spatial model, framing disappearance as a mediated condition rather than a preserved object. Such preservation elevates official narratives while marginalizing ordinary memories.Moving from the body’s initial rubbing to its temporal, mediated re-rubbing on video, Suh demonstrates that home—at once intimate and collective, preserved and erased, transient and enduring—is inseparable from the politics of history, power, and identity. Personal dwelling reverberates with national narratives, while collective histories are etched into embodied experience. In this sense, the moving image does not record the body’s rubbing of home but extends this rubbing relation into time, allowing it to persist as the afterlife of home.While rubbing tactically inscribes home through time, Suh’s textile architecture immerses the viewer within reconstructed domestic spaces. At the center of the exhibition was Nest/s (2024), part of Suh’s “impossible architecture” or Hubs series. Drawn from thresholds—corridors, doorways, and other transitional spaces—in places he once lived, Nest/s is assembled into a continuous, translucent passage of vivid color. Made from polyester fabric traditionally used in Korean summer garments, the material links architecture to the body. Walking through its soft, diaphanous rooms, the visitor becomes enveloped within the structure—no longer merely a user of space but a component of it, forming a symbiotic relation.Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) is a large white architectural space sewn from polyester and stitched with domestic details—doorknobs, faucets, light switches—collaged from multiple places the artist has lived. The layered composition produces a contradictory space: at once familiar and estranging. Ahmed notes, “Discomfort . . . allows things to move.”4 This disorientation becomes a method of reorganizing perception and reconfiguring identity.Through fragmentation and reassembly, Suh demonstrates that home is not a coherent architectural whole but an unstable assemblage of memories, objects, and sensory traces. After presenting homes that are portable, time-inscribed, and immersive, the gallery space darkens, ushering us into a final realm: the imagined home, suspended in an ambiguous futurity.Bridge Project (1999–), Suh’s long-term speculative proposal, envisions a “perfect home” suspended at the center of a bridge connecting three cities central to his life: Seoul, New York, and London. The bridge functions as both literal and metaphorical infrastructure, linking cultures, identities, and histories while also exposing geopolitical tensions, including newly emerging forms of territorial conflict under globalization. Presented through film, the work operates less as architectural documentation and more as a promotional video for a yet-to-exist future home. This medium renders the concept of home virtual, allowing it to grow within a fictional space. In this mediatized condition, home is no longer grounded in material foundations but floats in the digital imaginary.This speculative home is intentionally impossible, revealing the contradictions inherent in the desire for a singular, stable home in a world where physical dwellings are continually demolished, displaced, or dissolved. In Suh’s vision, home expands beyond the private, the local, even the nation-state. It becomes a conceptual practice: a critical tool for reimagining belonging in a globalized and digital world.The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House unfolded as a methodological guide for constructing home under conditions of displacement. From the portability achieved by compressing memory to the temporal inscriptions of rubbing, the immersive entanglement of textile architecture, and the speculative virtuality of Bridge Project, the exhibition demonstrated that home is neither fixed nor singular but continually produced through shifting media.Echoing Heidegger’s understanding of dwelling as a mode of being rather than of material possession, home for Suh is a fluid, foldable, constructible, and endlessly reconfigurable relation—a contact zone where personal migration, collective memory, and global politics converge. Suh invites us to rethink home not as a destination but as an ongoing negotiation: a dynamic recalibration of how we orient and situate ourselves and dwell within a world defined by movement. The exhibition thus offered not simply an account of home but a proposition for a new way of dwelling—a new mode of being—in an age of displacement.
Zhiqiang Li (Sun,) studied this question.