over 500 works by do ho suh on view at mmca, seoul exhibition
Do Ho Suh’s large-scale solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in Seoul brings together more than 500 drawings, sculptures, videos, and installations from across four decades, tracing an artistic practice shaped by questions of home, migration, memory, and identity. On view until February 9th, 2027, the exhibition moves from the artist’s earliest experiments to major fabric reconstructions and recent works, showing how Suh has gradually transformed personal experiences of relocation into a broader investigation of how people inhabit and remember space (read more here).
The MMCA exhibition makes this development visible by bringing works from different periods into a single spatial sequence. Galleries 3, 4, and 5, the museum’s communal areas, the MMCA Studio, and the Seoul Box become part of an exhibition that allows early and recent works, drawings and installations, domestic interiors and bodily forms to overlap.
Nest/s , 2024, Polyester and stainless steel, 410.1 x 2,148.7 × 375.4 cm
from childhood experiments to a language of portable space
The exhibition begins before the artist’s professional career with a section titled ‘Seed Bank.’ Installed in the corridor leading toward the galleries, it gathers childhood drawings and sculptures, including wooden carvings of sea creatures made in the yard of the hanok where Suh grew up, alongside his university graduation project, early installations, and experiments made before he left Korea to study in the United States.
These works are significant because they reveal that Suh’s interest in the boundary between object and space predates the fabric architecture for which he is best known. The early experiments already move between two and three dimensions, suggesting that the later preoccupation with rooms, thresholds, bodies, and structures developed from an ongoing investigation into how objects occupy space.
At the entrance to Gallery 3, Small Gate (2017) reconstructs the gate of the Seongbuk-dong hanok where Suh once lived. The work functions literally as an entrance, but also establishes the larger concern of the exhibition with movement between places and times.
It is followed by around 200 drawings, including works made through Suh’s collaboration with Singapore-based print and paper workshop STPI. Since 2009, the artist has developed a technique using gelatin tissue and handmade paper, embedding thread into the paper fibers. The resulting lines have a material depth that pushes drawing beyond the conventional flat surface.
Apartment A, Corridors and Staircases, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA(Kanazawa Version) , 2012 Polyester and stainless steel, Apt A: 690 × 430 × 245 cm; Corridors and Staircases: 1,328 × 179 × 1,175 cm
rubbing a home before it disappears
Gallery 4 focuses on Rubbing/Loving, a body of work that turns the act of recording architecture into a form of remembrance. Suh presses Hanji and paper against the surfaces of places he has lived in or that are disappearing, then rubs them with graphite and colored pencil to register their physical traces. The title comes from the phonetic resemblance between the Korean words for ‘rubbing’ and ‘loving,’ connecting the physical act of taking an imprint with an emotional attachment to place.
Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–2022), which Suh describes as a self-portrait of himself and his father, brings family memory into this process. Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012) extends the same method beyond the individual. Created collectively by Suh and a team who traced and rubbed the surfaces of the building, the work records a place through shared physical labor and becomes an archive of a disappearing collective history.
Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul , 2024, Polyester and stainless steel, 455 × 1,237 × 575 cm
architecture becomes an autobiography
Gallery 5 brings together several of the works most closely associated with Suh’s exploration of domestic space. Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) reconstructs his current London apartment, incorporating architectural details from the many homes he has inhabited, including door handles, outlets, and switches.
The Bridge Project, which began in 1999 as an imagined connection between Seoul and New York and later expanded to include London, pushes this question beyond the domestic interior. Developed with architects, philosophers, anthropologists, and engineers, the project shifts Suh’s concern with home toward larger questions of global connection, coexistence, society, and the environment.
Elsewhere in the gallery, Who Am We? (2000) fills a 15-meter-high space with tiny portraits derived from school yearbooks and other sources. From a distance, the faces form a pattern; up close, individual identities emerge. Floor (1997–2000), meanwhile, places a transparent platform on countless miniature figures, making the relationship between the individual and the collective something visitors physically encounter as they walk across the work.
MMCA Seoul, Do Ho Suh, Installation view
a city of homes that exists nowhere
The exhibition culminates outside Gallery 5 with Nest/s (2024), a 22-meter-long installation that connects architectural forms derived from Suh’s current and former residences and studios in Seoul, New York, London, Berlin, and other cities. The work creates a continuous sequence of spaces that does not correspond to any single real building. Instead, different places are joined into a new architectural environment that exists nowhere outside the exhibition. Visitors can physically move through this composite structure, turning a collection of remembered addresses into a shared spatial experience. Across his work, the building can disappear while the memory of inhabiting it remains. The research surrounding his practice connects this quality to a broader architectural history of flexible and impermanent environments, from Archigram and Cedric Price to contemporary ideas of mobile and reconfigurable space.
a sequence of domestic spaces in different colors | image © designboom
from home to body and back again
At the MMCA Studio, miniature models of Suh’s larger installations are shown alongside works centered on family and fatherhood, including Memory of Love (2026), which debuts here. For the work, pockets cut from family clothing are attached to the inside of Suh’s own coat, holding cherished objects close to the body. The gesture condenses several of the artist’s recurring concerns: clothing becomes a portable enclosure, the enclosure becomes a form of home, and home travels back onto the body.
This movement between body, clothing, architecture, and memory is characteristic of Suh’s practice. His fabric houses can be understood as architectural extensions of the body, while works such as Memory of Love reverse the relationship, turning clothing into a miniature architecture of memory
visitors move through overlapping fabric reconstructions of architectural interiors | image © designboom
architectural details from different homes converge in a layered installation | image © designboom
details of an interior wall, including shelves, doors, and tiled surfaces | image © designboom
colored architectural elements and domestic fixtures extend across the installation ceiling | image © designboom
household details appear as translucent, colored forms | image © designboom
Suh reproduces switches, outlets, and other domestic fixtures in colorful translucent forms | image © designboom
Room 516/516-I/516-II , 1994–1995 Muslin and zippers, 266.7 x 213.4 x 365.8 cm
MMCA Seoul, Do Ho Suh, Installation view
MMCA Seoul, Do Ho Suh, Installation view
Memory of Love (collaboration with RE;CODE) , 2026, Wool and nylon clothing, 93 x 45 x 30 cm
MMCA Seoul, Do Ho Suh, Installation view
visitors walk above a dense field of miniature figures in Suh’s Floor (1997–2000) | image © designboom
thousands of miniature figures support a transparent floor | image © designboom
Inverted Monument (2022) | image © designboom
Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home 2013-2022 | image © designboom
colorful human figures form a dense sculptural surface | image © designboom
Haunting Home, 2019, Thread embedded in STPI handmade cotton paper, 131.5 x 167 cm
Robin Hood Gardens, Woolmore Street, London E14 0HG , 2018, Single-channel video, color, sound (stereo), 28 min. 33 sec
project info:
name: Do Ho Suh
artist: Do Ho Suh | @dohosuhstudio
venue: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) | @mmcakorea, Seoul, South Korea
dates: August 27th, 2026 – February 9th, 2027
additional presentation: Apartment A, Unit 2, Corridor, and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA in the Seoul Box, December 18, 2026 – March 28, 2027
director: Kim Sunghee
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