A DEEPER RECESS 006: an interview with Do Ho Suh

We spoke to Do Ho Suh at the opening of his major exhibition at Tate Modern.

02 June 2025

Welcome to the 6th edition of A Deeper Recess, a newsletter from recessed.space that goes a bit further than The Recess, our news update, with a longer-read interview with a figure from the worlds of contemporary art & architecture.

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An interview with Do Ho Suh

Exhibition details available at: www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/the-genesis-exhibition-do-ho-suh

The London-based South Korean artist Do Ho Suh explores the idea of home & domestic architecture through a practice of drawing & sculpture, with his celebrated fabric architectural constructions a motif of his exploration of emigration, transience, memory, and vernacular. The Tate Modern presentation, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, features several large-scale works, including Nest/s, below, which overlays threshold moments from several of the artist’s former homes.

Another large work recreates the traditional Korean Hanok house owned by the artist’s parents and which he painstakingly covered in papers, rubbed by hand with graphite, before carefully being cut away from the original architecture and reassembled as a traced simulacra. For Suh, the haptic is central to architecture, whether in his processes or in the lived everyday experience, with doorknobs, light switches, and tactile surfaces recurring throughout his pieces.

This interview is published first here for the readers of The Recess, who support the work of recessed.space with a small monthly donation to help keep independent publishing alive. recessed.space has no external financial funding or advertising, so these donations help hugely with these newsletters and the 270 articles on the website.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s (2024). Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. © Do Ho Suh