Do Ho Suh returns to Seoul with exhibition beyond fabric walls

Do Ho Suh’s 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’s childhood drawings and thread paintings with recent works shaped by fatherhood.

“Do Ho Suh,” opening Thursday and running through Feb. 9, 2027, explores more than 500 works including installations, sculptures, drawings, videos and archival materials.

“The MMCA exhibition shows everything from drawings I made in kindergarten to my very latest works,” Suh said during a press event in Seoul, Wednesday.

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.

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

Beyond fabric house

The exhibition begins with “Seed Bank,” 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.

“More than awkwardness, honestly, I feel as if I had all my clothes taken off,” he said, finding that “the seeds” of his work over the past three decades were already present in those early drawings and objects.

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.

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.

His thread drawings, developed with Singapore’s 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.

“I had been working with fabric for a long time, but I had never even thought about drawing with thread,” he said. The experiment resulted in hundreds of works, he added, reconnecting him with a spontaneous impulse that large installations’ logistical demands had suppressed.

Curator Seol Won-ji said the exhibition departs from previous shows by demonstrating that the artist’s questions about clothing, body, space, migration and community did not begin with his internationally celebrated fabric houses.

Seol explained the exhibition shows that his ideas were “formed much earlier than the period we tend to associate with them,” and have continued from his early works to recent projects.

Korean roots, wider questions

The show also reconsiders Suh through a Korean lens, rather than solely through Western readings of diaspora, migration or architectural installation. Seol said Suh’s formative experience of learning art in Korea and living in a "hanok" — a traditional Korean house — shaped both his sense of identity and spatial awareness.

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.

“If I had grown up in an apartment building in Seoul, I would have translated that apartment into fabric,” he said. “It was never a strategic use of a Korean image for success.”

A major work in the exhibition, “Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home” (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’s physical traces while becoming, in the artist’s words, an architectural self-portrait of both father and son.

The exhibition’s newest works bring Suh’s reflections on home back to the body and family.

“Memory of Love” (2026) places pockets removed from his family’s 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.

For Suh, clothing has long been the smallest possible architecture — a first home that contains, protects and defines a body. Becoming a father transformed the emotional stakes of that idea.

Most of his familiar fabric houses, Suh said, were made when he was single, alone in empty rooms. “There was nobody between the room and me,” he said. After marriage and children, home became more than a physical setting: “The people between me and the room became part of the home."

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.

The exhibition runs through Feb. 9, 2027 in Seoul. It will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Hong Kong’s M+ next year.