Being invited into someone's home, into that most private of spaces, is a rare thing. It is rarer still in an age of dining out, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. To show a home in full is an expression of intimacy, the start of a deeper bond. Do Ho Suh, 64, one of Korea's leading contemporary artists, invites visitors into his own homes. Outside the Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Sogyeok-dong, Jongno District, where a large solo exhibition titled "Do Ho Suh" is under way, a long line forms every morning. It recalls the crowds five years ago for the special exhibition of works donated from the Lee Kun-hee Collection. It is rare for work that draws high critical praise to also enjoy broad popular appeal, but Suh's exhibitions always draw lines. Seoul Economic Daily sat down with the artist for an exclusive interview at the museum's VIP lounge on the 7th and asked why he keeps building houses through his work. At the beginning of it was something hotter than longing, something urgent. Fear that it might disappear crossed with a desperate wish to keep it.
"The house turns to white ash and blows away in the wind, and all that is left is an endless plaza. I am standing alone in the chill of a plaza that is man-made, not open wilderness, and the scene is as if I were looking down at myself from the air. I would wake with a jolt of loneliness, and only then realize it had been a dream."
When Suh was in elementary school, his father, Se Ok Suh (1929-2020), a pioneer of modern Korean ink abstraction, began building a hanok on a plot of land in Seongbuk-dong. Modeled on Yeongyeongdang Hall at Changdeokgung Palace, it was an 83-square-meter hanok that preserved tradition intact. Suh grew up there before leaving to study in the United States in the early 1990s, beginning an unfamiliar life in a New York apartment quite unlike the hanok of his hometown. The news he caught from Korea was mostly about North Korean missiles and the possibility of war. Around that time, he had the same nightmare night after night. Retracing his thoughts, Suh said, "I came to know that I had a home as I was leaving Korea, and at the same time I came to know that I did not have a home with me now and that a home could disappear." He added, "So I decided to move my home, and I began to conceive of a home that could be folded up lightly and carried in a suitcase."
That urgency was not his alone. His father, who built the hanok in Seongbuk-dong, felt much the same.
"So much of our traditional culture was lost through Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War. My father had an enormous obsession with 'even what little remains disappearing.' It was a wish to preserve. Until the house was built, our family moved from one relative's home to another, living six years in a single room. I was able to watch up close that difficult process, my mother's household ledger filled line by line as she stretched a Seoul National University professor's modest salary to the last won."
His father, who expanded the world of Korean painting on a foundation of classical Chinese learning, and his mother, Chung Min-ja, an adviser to the Arumjigi Culture Keepers Foundation, who studied history and researched traditional culture, joined forces in a shared purpose that produced not only the Seongbuk-dong hanok but also the soil from which Suh's art grew. Their urgency runs back another generation. The Dalseong Suh clan of Se Ok Suh, a native of Daegu, was a wealthy and distinguished family. Suh's great-grandfather, Suh Kwang-yong (1860-1932), believing the country must not be surrendered, liquidated assets to fund the independence movement. His grandfather, Suh Jang-hwan (1890-1970), went so far as to use the alias "Suh Sung-joon" to organize a secret society, the Sangui Society, in Daegu, and as a recruitment officer for the provisional government's independence bonds, raised military funds and sent them to Shanghai, China. He was arrested in 1923 and severely tortured, then hid in the foothills of Gyeryongsan Mountain to evade Japanese police surveillance. There he opened Donghung Uisuk, a school where he taught children the Korean spirit and the Korean script. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation, Patriot Medal, in 1990.
"My grandfather's urgency, in selling off all his property, came from the fear that my country and our Hangeul might disappear. My father's house in Seongbuk-dong was not a luxury hanok built at leisure. It began from the urgency of our traditional culture disappearing. And that state of mind, in which I began to make homes after the nightmares about having no home as I left Korea, is not mine alone. That urgency, when the entire nation joined the gold-collecting campaign during the International Monetary Fund crisis and gathered even wedding rings and babies' first-birthday rings, is in all of us."
His grandfather built a school for fear the nation would be lost, his father built a hanok for fear tradition would vanish, and Suh began building, through his work, homes light enough to fold and keep close at any time. The "homes" these men built out of urgency have run through generations and crossed time to reach the present. This meets another of the artist's signature works, "Karma," which stacks generations and moves across time. The piece, an endless chain of figures perched or standing on the shoulders of those below, speaks of karma and ties carried forward from a past we do not fully know. Of the "Karma" series, Suh said, "If even one person were missing from the lineage, the person I am now could not exist, so all of us who are alive are the product of a miracle, and every living thing carries its own enormous fan-shaped karma." Drawings in which threads extend from a walking figure's head like a thick head of hair, with houses hanging in clusters at their ends, express the same idea. People build houses, but those houses in turn shape and reflect their lives. "The concept of home follows wherever I go. Like a ghost."
The work where visitors linger unusually long at this exhibition is "Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home," a monumental full-scale rubbing of the Seongbuk-dong hanok. Hanji was laid over the entire house and rubbed with graphite in every corner. Walls, doors, the grain of pillars, the gaps in lattice work, the door handles worn by hands and even the foundation stones were lifted. The work began in 2013 and was completed in 2022. "I work in the visual arts, but ironically I could not trust sight and had to mobilize touch," said Suh, who deliberately covered his eyes and caressed every part of the house relying only on the sense in his fingertips. Just as when you have felt every part of a face, hands and feet, you can later recall a person's presence through that warmth and texture even after they are gone.
"The 'rubbing' in the title means to rub, and it is written in Korean the same way as 'loving.' The name my father gave the Seongbuk-dong house was Musongjae, meaning to caress a pine tree. The 'mu' here is the same character as in the word for caressing, the touch of a hand that carries love. I think I know the hanok, but how much can I trust what I have seen with my eyes? Yet if I trace this house entirely with my fingertips and inscribe it on my body as if embodying it, if I can carry that experience whole, then I thought I would be able not to grieve even if the home in Seoul disappeared. I made homes out of brightly colored fabric, but really they are about leaving and disappearing, about the finiteness of time."
An individual does not exist alone. A self is formed only within layered time and eras, relationships and society. The attempt to gather that scattered time and place into one is the "Perfect Home" project now under way. When he joined one wall each from the homes he lived in, in Seoul, New York and London, with the doors facing inward, the center came out empty. "I arrived at the realization that the perfect home is empty air, a void," he said.
An artist long called Do Ho Suh, son of Se Ok Suh, showed at this exhibition the Do Ho Suh who is a father of two daughters. In the MMCA Studio on the museum's second floor, the trousers and coats his daughters wore as they grew are laid in layers of varying size, like growth rings. Living in London, he handles the laundry in the division of household chores. "In the process of sorting laundry washed by color, emotion wells up and I can see the children's growth and change," he said. "The more they grow, the more that childhood fades away, so I could not bring myself to throw out the clothes that hold that energy and piled them up in the studio." That became the basis of "Memories of Love (in collaboration with RE;CODE)," a new work unveiled for the first time here. Pockets cut from the clothes of his father, mother, wife and daughters are attached to the inside of a worn coat the artist wore for years, with the family's objects placed inside them. As if the coat were spreading its arms to embrace them, the family sits within his warm bosom. Perhaps this is the perfect home. "Clothing is the smallest space we can enter, live in and move around in, and architecture is an extension of that," he said. Then he whispered in a small voice.
"I cannot bring myself to use the word 'shroud,' but I thought of it as the clothing I would want to wear when going from this world to the next. The moment I put my arms into it, the warmth and energy of my family wrap around me."
Next to the Seongbuk-dong hanok, on the site of the building he used as a studio before leaving to study abroad, a museum named after his father is to be built. Seongbuk Museum of Art will hold a two-person exhibition of Se Ok Suh and Do Ho Suh beginning on the 19th of next month. It is an exhibition that unfolds the hanok narrative of two artists who built their artistic worlds out of Seongbuk-dong, and part of the first Seongbuk Art Week 2026, titled "Home, Continued Breath." Suh is still searching for the perfect home and is working on a "Bridge Project" that lays bridges between homes. The nation his great-grandfather and grandfather tried to defend, the hanok his father tried to preserve, the homes the son has built from fabric, thread and clothing — perhaps the perfect home he has sought all his life is already complete. Inside the homes Suh has long been building, at the end of the many bridges he has laid, there was, in the end, a person.
