Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh (born 1962 in Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and film, exploring ideas of home, displacement, memory, identity and the relationship between the individual and the collective. He is particularly known for his full-scale architectural reconstructions made from translucent fabric, which recreate spaces he has inhabited in Seoul, Providence, Berlin, London and New York. By transforming domestic architecture into portable and fragile structures, Suh examines how physical spaces can carry personal history, cultural memory and a sense of belonging. Architecture and domestic space are central to Suh’s practice. His works consider how individuals are shaped by the spaces they inhabit and how memories of those spaces persist even after they have been left behind. The transparency and lightness of his fabric structures allow architectural interiors to become simultaneously tangible and elusive, merging past and present, private and public, and personal experience with collective histories. His installations therefore approach architecture not simply as a physical structure but as a repository of memory, identity and lived experience. Suh’s interest in movement and displacement is also reflected in his own experience of migration. After studying in Korea, he moved to the United States in 1991 and subsequently lived and worked across different cities, including New York, London and Seoul. His education includes a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, completed in 1994, followed by an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1997. These experiences of moving between different cultural and architectural environments became an important context for his continuing investigation of home and belonging. His practice extends beyond fabric architecture to include film, photography and other forms of installation. In works such as Robin Hood Gardens, commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Suh used time-lapse photography, drone footage, 3D scanning and photogrammetry to explore a housing complex facing demolition, focusing on the accumulated histories, memories and lives associated with the building. Across these different media, his work repeatedly considers the relationship between architecture and the people who inhabit it. Suh has presented his work internationally at major museums and exhibitions, including Tate Modern in London, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Art Sonje Center in Seoul. He represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and has participated in major international exhibitions including the Istanbul Biennial and the Sydney Biennial. His work is held in significant public collections including Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and LACMA. Through sculpture, architecture, film and installation, Suh continues to investigate how places become embedded in memory and how identity is shaped through movement between spaces. His work transforms architecture into a means of thinking about belonging, displacement and the fragile relationship between individual experience and collective space.