Do Ho Suh | Ghosts of Home
Viewing Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern
2025.5.12
We enter a space that shuttles us constantly between memory and bodily experience, where home becomes a restitched container, and also an uninhabitable phantom.
For him, home seems less about possession than about experience and remembrance. In his interview for this Tate exhibition, he repeatedly mentions that home only begins to exist after it is lost. It is a retroactive experience that slowly grows only after he begins to migrate, to move away. He attempts to preserve the physical traces of those spaces through fabric, rubbings, and other methods, hoping to replace the act of return itself through bodily representation. This desire to preserve is both simple and genuine, accompanied by unease. He says that after completing a rubbing of a space, he no longer needs to return, because he has already experienced that memory to completion.
His creative mechanism is built upon collaboration and mechanical craftsmanship. He uses electronic devices to assist with drawing, works collaboratively with multiple people, removing personal traces and handmade qualities from the work. This is often understood as a dilution of artistic style, a response to the ethics of artistic creation. Yet he also retains certain practices with an intensely handmade quality, especially his embroidery works—those thread-sewn images are dense and labor-intensive, maintaining the repetitiveness of the hand and the consumption of the body. This juxtaposition itself constitutes the tension in his work, having both the intention of de-individualization while retaining the creator's dependence on making by hand.
The symbolism of thread in his work is extremely complex. From a material perspective, thread is blood vessel, is network—thread strings together space, body, kinship, and home. Thread is a form of connection, also suture, a physical manifestation of relationships. But simultaneously, the homes he sews with thread cannot shelter from rain. Thread should mend ruptures, but when it becomes a space itself, it becomes a failed structure. The works thus present a dual state: both the outline of shelter and a revelation of the fragility of being sheltered. If you have never seen his works in person, from photographs they appear more like plastic models than handicrafts—they are structurally regular, orderly, making it hard to imagine they are made of thread. Does this displacement and departure from materiality also express, on some level, that the more precise the structure, the more untrustworthy it appears?
The sense of space in his works also points to deeper psychological mechanisms. From the perspective of spatial psychology, Suh's works provoke our thinking about cognitive mapping. The homes he constructs are not physically inhabitable spaces in reality, but closer to the vague and subjective spatial impressions in our memory. When we move through them, we feel the tension between body and immaterial space, activating our internal spatial cognitive systems. We do not merely live in space, but live in the space we perceive. From an existentialist philosophical perspective, space only becomes part of our "being-there" when we cognize it.
His works do not resolve these contradictions, but faithfully expose them. In the interview he also mentions that speaking of homesickness under the premise of free migration itself carries class-based rupture, is a kind of luxury privilege. Many people have no choice to leave, no place to return to, or have never had a home. In this sense, his melancholy is not universal but partial, a pain constituted by the capacity for choice. This awareness is briefly mentioned in the interview but not further developed. He seems more willing to stop after becoming aware, not uncovering deeper structures.
My friend and I, while viewing the exhibition, happened to overhear another overseas student like us say: "Hilarious, East Asians are always looking for home." This remark was a joke, but it touched upon some kind of inertia deep in culture. Do Ho Suh's works indeed resonate with this long-term, introverted, persistent spatial searching. In visual language, his practice also brings to mind Chiharu Shiota. Shiota uses dense red or black threads to entangle space, dealing with internal emotions and bodily memory, while Suh leans more toward external structures and social space. But both attempt to present the invisible through visible materials: memories, perceptions, connections, the internal fissures brought by migration. Neither addresses emotional outlets, but rather presents the emotional structure itself.
Do Ho Suh's works do not provide a definition of what home is. He only continuously, repeatedly sews it, rubs it, attempting to delay its disappearance. In his Perfect Home series, he even randomly arranges data from multiple real spaces, using computational programs to combine them into a non-existent home. There, space becomes a kind of redistributable structural logic, but also loses the certainty of belonging.