{"id":596503,"date":"2026-08-26T11:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T11:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/596503\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T11:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T11:24:13","slug":"do-ho-suh-returns-to-seoul-with-exhibition-beyond-fabric-walls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/596503\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Ho Suh returns to Seoul with exhibition beyond fabric walls"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Visitors<\/p>\n

Visitors look around Do Ho Suh’s “Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul” (2024) installed at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul, during a preview of the exhibition “Do Ho Suh,” Wednesday. Yonhap<\/p>\n

Do Ho Suh\u2019s translucent fabric houses have long made him one of the most globally recognizable Korean contemporary artists. But an upcoming exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) Seoul seeks to move beyond the familiar fabric forms to bring together the 64-year-old artist\u2019s childhood drawings and thread paintings with recent works shaped by fatherhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo Ho Suh,\u201d opening Thursday and running through Feb. 9, 2027, explores more than 500 works including installations, sculptures, drawings, videos and archival materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe MMCA exhibition shows everything from drawings I made in kindergarten to my very latest works,\u201d Suh said during a press event in Seoul, Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The exhibition was initially conceived as a retrospective, he said, but the museum and the artist quickly concluded that format would not work for a practice containing large-scale, site-specific and permanently installed works that cannot be transported to the museum.<\/p>\n

Instead, the exhibit refocused on his early works \u2014 many of which have rarely or never been shown in Korea \u2014 along with new projects to reveal the formative ideas behind a massive body of work that is too often reduced to fabric homes.<\/p>\n

Beyond fabric house<\/p>\n

The exhibition begins with \u201cSeed Bank,\u201d a corridor-like presentation of childhood drawings, student projects, early installation pieces and experiments that led to his textile architecture. For Suh, revisiting the works left him feeling unexpectedly exposed.<\/p>\n

\"Do<\/p>\n

Do Ho Suh (2025) \/ Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

\u201cMore than awkwardness, honestly, I feel as if I had all my clothes taken off,\u201d he said, finding that \u201cthe seeds\u201d of his work over the past three decades were already present in those early drawings and objects.<\/p>\n

Born in Seoul in 1962, Suh studied Korean painting at Seoul National University before moving to the United States, where he studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and sculpture at Yale University.<\/p>\n

The MMCA show foregrounds that academic trajectory, notably through 215 drawings that reveal his continuing interest in the boundary between two- and three-dimensional space.<\/p>\n

His thread drawings, developed with Singapore\u2019s STPI workshop starting in 2009, employ threads embedded in handmade paper to produce images that hover between drawing, sculpture and architecture. Suh said the medium emerged almost accidentally during an artist residency after a staff member suggested he work with thread.<\/p>\n

\"Do<\/p>\n

Do Ho Suh’s “Haunting Home” (2019), thread embedded in STPI handmade cotton paper \/ Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

\u201cI had been working with fabric for a long time, but I had never even thought about drawing with thread,\u201d he said. The experiment resulted in hundreds of works, he added, reconnecting him with a spontaneous impulse that large installations\u2019 logistical demands had suppressed.<\/p>\n

Curator Seol Won-ji said the exhibition departs from previous shows by demonstrating that the artist\u2019s questions about clothing, body, space, migration and community did not begin with his internationally celebrated fabric houses.<\/p>\n

Seol explained the exhibition shows that his ideas were \u201cformed much earlier than the period we tend to associate with them,\u201d and have continued from his early works to recent projects.<\/p>\n

\"Do<\/p>\n

Do Ho Suh’s “Uni-Form\/s: Self-Portrait\/s (My 39 Years)” (2005) installation at MMCA Seoul \/ Courtesy of MMCA<\/p>\n

Korean roots, wider questions<\/p>\n

The show also reconsiders Suh through a Korean lens, rather than solely through Western readings of diaspora, migration or architectural installation. Seol said Suh\u2019s formative experience of learning art in Korea and living in a “hanok” \u2014 a traditional Korean house \u2014 shaped both his sense of identity and spatial awareness.<\/p>\n

Still, Suh cautioned against treating the hanok in his work as a calculated sign of Korean identity. He recreated it because it was simply the place in which he had grown up, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had grown up in an apartment building in Seoul, I would have translated that apartment into fabric,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was never a strategic use of a Korean image for success.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Do<\/p>\n

Do Ho Suh’s “Rubbing\/Loving: Seoul Home” (2013-2022) is installed at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul, during a preview of the exhibition “Do Ho Suh,” Wednesday. Yonhap<\/p>\n

A major work in the exhibition, \u201cRubbing\/Loving: Seoul Home\u201d (2013-2022) records the surface of the Seongbuk-dong hanok built by his late father, architect Suh Si-hai. Through the graphite rubbings on hanji, the work preserves the house\u2019s physical traces while becoming, in the artist\u2019s words, an architectural self-portrait of both father and son.<\/p>\n

The exhibition\u2019s newest works bring Suh\u2019s reflections on home back to the body and family.<\/p>\n

\u201cMemory of Love\u201d (2026) places pockets removed from his family\u2019s clothing inside the lining of a coat that the artist has kept for years. The pockets contain personal objects, turning the garment into a portable repository of familial memory.<\/p>\n

\"Do<\/p>\n

Do Ho Suh’s “Memory of Love (collaboration with RE;CODE)” (2026) \/ Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

For Suh, clothing has long been the smallest possible architecture \u2014 a first home that contains, protects and defines a body. Becoming a father transformed the emotional stakes of that idea.<\/p>\n

Most of his familiar fabric houses, Suh said, were made when he was single, alone in empty rooms. \u201cThere was nobody between the room and me,\u201d he said. After marriage and children, home became more than a physical setting: \u201cThe people between me and the room became part of the home.”<\/p>\n

Seol described the exhibition as a circular journey rather than a chronological one, creating a structure in which early student works, architectural installations, drawings, clothes and family objects continually meet again.<\/p>\n

The exhibition runs through Feb. 9, 2027 in Seoul. It will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Hong Kong\u2019s M+ next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Visitors look around Do Ho Suh’s “Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul” (2024) installed at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-596503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}