On Thread, Rubbing, and the Fragile Architecture of Home

Do Ho Suh, Walk the House, Tate Modern, London (May 1– October 26, 2025)

Do Ho Suh’s weightless reconstructions of his past homes—as seen in Nest/s (2024), a monumental fabric installation featured in Walk the House at Tate Modern—evoke an aching recognition of what it means to long for “home.” This ache resonates especially with those who, like myself, have moved across cities and countries, continually negotiating between the heaviness of longing for home and the weightlessness of unsettled presence. In recent years, contemporary art addressing migration has moved away from telling comprehensive histories. Instead, artists foreground fractured perspectives, material traces, and embodied conditions, offering marks rather than linear narratives. This shift is evident across diverse geographies, from Asia to Central and Eastern Europe, where migration has been reframed not only as exile or forced mobility but as a structural and lived condition.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024. Installation view at Tate, London. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, and Victoria Miro. Photograph by Jeon Taeg Su.

Korean society has long lived in tension with its borders, haunted by forced migrations—shaped by colonial exile and wartime flight, as well as centuries of invasions from surrounding empires, down to the present constraints of the DMZ. Yet within this tension, Korea cultivated a rich cultural legacy of architecture, craft, and memory. Artist Do Ho Suh’s fabric houses rematerialize this legacy within the frame of contemporary migration. His works recast cultural inheritance—once bound to survival against encroachment—into portable architectures that embody a global meditation on home and displacement.

Co-curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi and Dina Akhmadeeva, the exhibition situates Suh’s practice within a broader curatorial attention to the architectural capacity of weaving thread into spaces of home as structures that envelop the viewer’s body. Comparable concerns have surfaced across major institutions in recent years. For example, Chiharu Shiota’s visceral webs of “red strings” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2025) make visible the invisible ties of fate while theatrically interlacing objects of migration into communal architectures of memory. Akhmadeeva’s 2022–23 presentation of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s monumental fiber entanglements, which, as curator Ann Coxon observed at the Tate, “could almost enfold you and that you could walk inside, like cocoons or tents,” evoking survival itself—maternal skin at once soft and unyielding.(Ann Coxon, quoted in Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, exhibition at Tate Modern, November 17, 2022 – May 21, 2023; Tate, Step Inside Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Forest of Woven Sculptures. YouTube video, 0:59s, January 6, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrxx3tpEuco; ICA Boston, “Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home,” YouTube video, 3:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBtYzoYMbqs.) Placed within this terrain, Suh’s fragile fabric dwellings register a distinct inflection: threads as both body and building. Here, lightness and permeability—neither fully solid nor entirely spectral—function as principles of space, articulating his practice as that of an architect-weaver.

The raw clash of Suh’s Fallen Star 1/5 (2008)—a sculptural recreation of his childhood hanok (a traditional Korean wooden house), colliding with a brownstone building that replicates the artist’s first home in America—struck the London art scene in the 2008 Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. That very rupture paradoxically anchored his fabric Staircase III (2010)—a foldable transitional space carried in Suh’s suitcase—in Tate’s permanent collection in 2011.(Tate, “Do Ho Suh – Staircase-III | TateShots,” YouTube video, 4:52, March 29, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYEF_GXilu8.) In his current exhibition, Walk the House, Suh threads architectures of home into a spatial language rooted in the hanok, a house designed to fold, travel, and reassemble elsewhere. In traditional Korean architecture, to “walk the house” (jibeul geotda) is a literal process: a hanok, built without nails and held by interlocking joints, can be dismantled, transported, and rebuilt. This principle of mobility underpins Suh’s fabric reconstructions; through tracing, rubbing, and stitching, memory is reshaped into fragile yet enduring architectures, with the hanok itself becoming a living framework for his diasporic life. His own childhood hanok—modeled after Changdeokgung Palace and built by his father in 1970s Seoul when such houses were rapidly disappearing—functions as both subject and method throughout his practice. By “walking the house” with thread, pigment, and paper, the disassembly of the hanokbecomes a ritual of rubbing and stitching, each mark binding fragments into a structure always in the making. For Suh, home is no longer singular but a permeable structure of remembrance, continually reshaped by the body and held in breath and light.

This curatorial premise is notably imaginative, making palpable how Suh “walks” his past dwellings into the present. As the following close visual analysis will explore, the exhibition unfolds as an intricate constellation of fragile architectures. Yet, amid nine installations, two videos, and seventy-seven works on paper, the absence of the Fallen Star series (2008–2011)—with their three-dimensional volumetric presences (apart from one small drawing)—is striking. Its exclusion from Walk the House may be explained by formal considerations, since the series’ spectacular collisions of architectural forms would not have aligned with the exhibition’s framing that emphasizes thin surface membranes. Still, the omission ultimately reveals the exhibition’s limitation: namely, the loss of the disruptive spatial energy that the Fallen Star series once so powerfully embodied. The series’ awkward placements of a hanok within Western buildings—forced into sites structurally out of joint—offered vivid images of dislocation, generating an intensity of rupture that opens possibilities for repair. Had one such work greeted visitors at the threshold, it might have foregrounded the radical forces of disassembly and reassembly that lie at the heart of Suh’s practice of “walking the house.”

Beginning with the wallpaper installation Who Am We? (2000)—thousands of tiny yearbook portraits that blur into a mass from afar yet resolve into faces up close—the exhibition stages the tension between individual and collective before leading viewers into Nest/s, a long corridor of overlapping “home-trails” or life-sized replicas of every space the artist has inhabited. Viewers’ ghostlike silhouettes, cast onto the translucent fabric from within, echo the layered transparency of the work itself. Nowhere more than in Nest/s –a corridor of radiant translucency that concentrates Suh’s practice of “walking the house” into lived form –does the exhibition gather its language of lightness so vividly. By layering imprinted forms of his childhood, from his New York apartment to his London home, in soft, overlapping hues, Suh creates chromatic echoes of hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper), whose gentle luminosity diffuses light like breath. The sensorial effects of these corridors make his meditation on home palpably felt as both intimate and shared. Window structures complete with doorknobs—fixtures once shaping his daily touch—become imprints of memory, transformed into a hall of collective presences that project shifting identities across architectural thresholds. These spectral traces materialize as tactile forms, conjuring the uncertain labor of remembering a home resistant to fixed location, yet giving shape to what might otherwise remain invisible.

Nonetheless, the artist’s ethereal forms are more than delicate surfaces in neatly woven frames. They are homes where lightness bears memory and opens onto deeper histories of weaving, spaces where vulnerability is inseparable from labor and survival. Historically, these textiles—such as mosi (ramie), traditionally used in Korean summer clothing—were produced by highly skilled women weavers.(UNESCO, “Weaving of Mosi (Fine Ramie) in the Hansan Region,” Video, 9:48, 2011, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/RL/.) The spinning of ramie depended on women’s bodies as instruments, with their teeth, nails, and knees serving as tools, in a practice that left them vulnerable to physical harm.(Mi-Hye Nam, “Weaving Labor of Women in the Joseon Dynasty through Spinning Process,” Sahak Yonku: The Review of Korean History 133 (March 2019): 293–325.) In a culture that valued delicate handcraftsmanship, women’s weaving bore more ambivalent connotations. While embroidery was celebrated as a Confucian virtue among noblewomen, weaving often bore more ambivalent connotations as skilled female weavers were sometimes associated with hardship or marital instability, and widows frequently relied on paid needlework to survive.(Sooa Im McCormick, “Exploring Gender Roles in the Creation of Korean Embroidery Arts,” Cleveland Museum of Art, August 6, 2020, https://www.clevelandart.org/articles/exploring-gender-roles-creation-korean-embroidery-arts.) Seen through this lens, Suh’s fabric constructions recall historically invisible female labor bound to the fragilities of home itself—marked by ill-fated marriage or widowhood—and reframed here, intentionally or otherwise, as an architectural language in which thread becomes at once structure and cultural memory.

Within this woven architecture, thread becomes an architectural membrane, skins that hold the memory of the weaver’s labor and survival—present in material traces yet absent in what can no longer be fully grasped. With visible seams, viewers are drawn to subtle ruptures. One home folds into another, and architectural logic dissolves into a craftsmanship of rupture that precariously holds these improbable forms together.(Monica Junta, “Moving through the World: Art Making as Transcultural Praxis,” in The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, ed. Nabila Abdel Nabi and Dina Akhmadeeva, with Amie Corry (London: Tate Publishing, 2025), 84.) This stitched surface stands in stark contrast to the solidity of Western brick-and-mortar architecture. Embodying both the vulnerability and resilience of lived space, the hand-sewn thread functions like connective tissue, suturing spatial fragments of memory that bear the imperfect yet deeply human act of preservation.

Do Ho Suh, Blueprint, 2014. Thread embedded in paper, 76.2 × 101.6 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin. Photograph by Hyunsoo Kim.

This structural logic of thread as architectural skins finds striking expression in Blueprint (2014), a thread-based architectural drawing of Suh’s New York apartment. The building’s façade appears as a pale blue membrane, stitched and frayed at the edges with strands unraveling into open space. The porch is filled with wisps of thread, suggesting a building simultaneously smoldering, disintegrating, or forming anew. Behind it, a dense field of tightly knotted threads spread across the floor, from which apertures emerge: holes, bulges, and a conical pile of thread that resembles a human figure, nearly indistinguishable from the structure itself. Here, thread becomes a primordial method of conflating body and building—both rendered in the same fragile, fibrous material—suggesting that thread is the very substance from which structures and selves are formed. Home appears as a structure perpetually in formation, always at risk of unraveling yet generative in its fragility.

The sense of structural vulnerability becomes tangible in Suh’s rubbings on delicate, semi-transparent hanji or hanji-like paper, which function as the permeable skin of architecture itself. The paper does not merely receive impressions but also absorbs presence; every crease, stain, and mark holds time and touch, making fragility itself a record. Although susceptible to tearing, warping, and dissolution, hanji nevertheless transmits these traces, making it a compelling medium for Suh’s exploration of memory and displacement. His stitching and rubbing are not merely formal parallels but shared modes of thinking and making, slow meditative processes enacted upon fragile yet responsive surfaces. Both render visible what might otherwise remain ephemeral—joints, borders, the quiet labor of dwelling—while reinscribing the body into the architectural surface.

Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013–2022. Installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. © Do Ho Suh. Image courtesy of the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London; and Victoria Miro. Repurposing supported by Genesis. Photograph by Jai Monaghan.

This material language recalls the Korean tradition of takbon (or rubbing), a centuries-old technique used to transfer the surface of sacred texts and inscriptions onto paper. More than mechanical reproduction; takbon was a spiritual practice, both the calligraphic energy and the material presence of sacred texts. The softness and absorbency of hanji allowed it to register not only visual detail but also the incised energy of brushwork, transforming carved inscriptions into living, breathing documents. This ancient practice—rooted in reverence and repetition—finds an unexpected echo in Suh’s tactile reconstructions, in which walls, ceilings, and stairways become sacred surfaces meant to be rubbed and preserved. With quiet devotion, he transfers their textures onto hanji, producing ghostly impressions that hold architectural forms of inhabitation and longing. These are not copies but translations, tactile records of presence created through contact and care. For example, in Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), a rubbing of his childhood hanok, the hanji surface bears water stains and reddish-brown smudges spreading organically, adding layers of visual complexity. Penciled lines tracing lattice windows appear slightly jagged; square grid patterns wobble, resisting geometric precision. Hanji does not yield a diagram of structure but instead a fragile echo of materialized memory—an architectural surface understood not as a boundary but as a threshold between interior and exterior, past and present, personal and cultural. Here, Suh invents an architecture held together not by walls, but by threads and traces.

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, 2014–23. Installation view, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2024 (shown at Tate, 2025). Photograph by Sam Drake.

In Rubbing/Loving Project: Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York (2014), Suh’s spatial thinking intersects with the Wunderkammer—with its impulse to gather the world’s wonders—one of the central traditions of early modern collecting in Europe. Suh’s boxlike installation of seven vertical panels unfolds in the spirit of this tradition, assembling often-overlooked thresholds of the home. Three large central panels depict an interior wall, a wall with a partial window, and a tall French window. To the left, three narrower panels cluster dense rubbings of doorknobs, switches, electrical outlets, and baseboards arranged in horizontal tiers. These contrast with the far-right panel, which features a small square window with a horizontal sash. Rendered in radiant yellow pigment, each object of curiosity appears wrapped in a luminous bojagi—a traditional Korean wrapping cloth used to carry and protect belongings. However, Suh’s wrappings are made not of fabric but rather of light entering the gallery, gently veiling the work’s architectural fixtures and glass panes in a translucent glow. Here, Suh captures not only architectural memory but also the presence of light as a living skin, a medium of intimacy and preservation. His cabinet—like the home it evokes—is not a static container but an archive of transitions, where light, memory, and space remain in motion.

Do Ho Suh, Staircase, 2016, installation view at Tate, London. Photograph by Tate (Jai Monaghan).

In Staircase (2016), Suh’s ability to animate the architectural elements of home reaches a disquieting intensity that suggests structural expansion. The saturated, crimson hue of the banisters—once part of a three-dimensional stairwell installation—now appears flattened, like the jointed legs of a spider, frozen mid-motion on paper. Suspended and delicate, these linear forms drift across the translucent handmade sheet like biological specimens pinned to a microscope slide. Raw and saturated, they cling to the edges of translucent red fabric, now gathered into a womb-like shape. Where semi-translucent fabrics overlap, they start to resemble blood vessels branching across the body of an uncanny being. Staircase, poised on the verge of dissolution yet held together by stitching, epitomizes how Suh binds fragility and endurance. What emerges here and throughout Suh’s work is not simply a record of a once-inhabited space but an afterimage, an architectural imprint charged with memory and transformation. In collaboration with the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Suh developed a technique of stitching thread into gelatin tissue paper, reflecting a water-soluble material historically used in embroidery.(Akhmadeeva, Akhmadeeva, and Corry, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, 64.) Embedded into wet handmade paper, the threads remain as the gelatin dissolves, forming impressions through material accident as they adhere unpredictably to the dissolving surface. The result is a delicate transcription of architectural fragments—stair rails, doorknobs, light switches—flattened into translucent membranes that echo intimate gestures of folding, preserving, and carrying close.

Do Ho Suh, Staircase, 2016, Detail at Tate, London. Photograph by Tate (Jai Monaghan).

All of these processes—threading, layering, dissolving—converge into an image of a fragmented body recomposed. The tactile structure of Staircase recalls the myth of Arachne, the weaver transformed into a spider for her defiance and condemned to spin for eternity. Yet in Suh’s work, this reference is not allegorical but material. His acts of rubbing and stitching mirror Arachne’s fate—a perpetual act of weaving, unraveling, and metamorphosis—not as punishment, but metaphor for the vulnerability and persistence of creative labor. Woven between body and building, myth and material, Suh’s architecture is not upheld by walls but bound by thread and breath. The sheer intensity of red—saturated, bleeding—evokes a structure drawn from the body’s deepest vulnerability, inseparable from the imagination’s pulse of an architect-weaver.

Sena Lee

Dr. Sena Lee is an art historian whose doctoral research at University College London examined the reframing of mythological pictorial space in seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish painting, with particular focus on the spatial intersections of painting and architecture. After a decade of study in London (2010–2019) and subsequent years living in Washington, D.C., she developed a nuanced critical perspective and a lasting curiosity in bridging cultural dialogues between Western art traditions and contemporary Korean art. Born in Seoul and now based in New York City, her diasporic experiences shape her scholarship and inform her engagement with artists whose work investigates themes of migration, memory, and spatial belonging.