Do Ho Suh: Breathing Home | Recent Drawings

Since architecture has been a continuous presence and protagonist in his art, Suh’s attention to the various modes of representation used in architectural practice – plans, perspectives and elevations – and how these can be adapted and modified from their technical origins to unlock their expressive potential, is an inevitable focus.

Suh’s Scaled Behaviour works are crafted in automated dialogue with machine.

Suh’s Scaled Behaviour works are crafted in automated dialogue with machine, created through a complex process using the scripting language of architectural modelling programmes. The resulting forms, labyrinthine yet intimate, acknowledge the roles of both the digital and the analogue in their production and also encourage us to think of vascular systems or the flow of blood, continuing Suh’s alignment of architecture and the body.

‘Drawing is very bound up in breathing and chanting practices for me.’ — Do Ho Suh

Suh’s Spectator drawings are evocative, intricate drawings which capture the connection between individuals and the whole by creating a continual portrait in unbroken line. In this series, Suh uses a combination of delicate line work and layered textures to depict repeated abstract faces. The drawings represent the process of the artist’s conscious mediative breathing, with each uninterrupted mark the duration of Suh’s breath.

Several works are titled Karma ­­­– which Suh explores in an expanded sense to consider relationships between belongings, objects and people.

At his most introspective and direct, other works reveal the artist looking inwards at himself and also outwards – to raise pragmatic questions about boundaries and interconnectedness, where individual lives start and end, where and when home exists, and how past, present and future are interlinked. Several works are titled Karma ­­­– which Suh explores in an expanded sense to consider relationships between belongings, objects and people.

Together, the works on view can be considered as chains in Suh’s career-long consideration of home as both a physical structure and a lived experience

Together, the works on view can be considered as chains in Suh’s career-long consideration of home as both a physical structure and a lived experience, the transitional moments in his own life and the passages – physical or philosophical – that transport individuals through various stages of their lives. In works on paper, Suh’s ideas have found a consistent vehicle of expression, with often the biggest question posed in the smallest sketch.

Over a career spanning more than thirty years and a vast array of mediums, Do Ho Suh’s work has circled around a constellation of recurring themes: memory, belonging, domesticity, corporeality, monuments, and collectivity. Published by MACK in April 2025, Anatomy is the first comprehensive survey of this interrelated and expanding body of work. New essays by Rachel Armstrong, Douglas Fogle, Lynne Tillman, Renee Gladman, Hugh Brody, Penelope Haralambidou, Amie Corry, and Jung-Ah Woo reflect on and respond to Suh’s work from a variety of perspectives, while an extended conversation between Suh and Tavares Strachan prefaces the book, completing an authoritative and immersive reference to one of the world’s foremost working artists.

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Born in 1962 in South Korea, Do Ho Suh received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. He currently lives and works in London. On view 1 May–19 October 2025 at Tate Modern, London, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House explores the breadth and depth of Suh’s practice over the last three decades, including new and site-specific works on display for the first time.

Suh represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, and has staged numerous recent international solo exhibitions and site-specific projects at institutional venues including: Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas (2024); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2024); the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2022); Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles (2019);  Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2019); Museum Voorlinden, The Hague (2019); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2018); Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2018); Towada Art Center, Japan (2018); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2018); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2013); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2012 – 2013 and 2005); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2012); University of San Diego, California (2012); Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2012); Seattle Art Museum, Washington (2011 and 2003) and Tate Modern, London (2011). Do Ho Suh has participated in the Singapore Biennale (2016), 8th Gwangju Biennale (2012), 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2010), and 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010). The first survey exhibition of Do Ho Suh’s work in Europe was presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2002.

Suh’s work is held in numerous museum collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate, London; Leeum, Seoul; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, among many others.