For me space is not just a physical thing.
I started to think about energy or spirit more and more which physical spaces contain.
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho SuH: Walk The House
The whole spirit of this exhibition was, for me, also sort of playing with the museum space as an architecture or museum as an institution.
When you enter the main space, you will see the architectural elements scattered around.
They’re all displaced spaces from my previous and current homes.
From the different places, but also from the different time.
The idea of home is a very complex one.
It's like a juxtaposition of many different things.
It's more about the notion of space and movability.
NEST/S
2024
That's how I end up using light, translucent fabric as a material to construct the piece, which can be folded into the suitcase like clothing for the transportability.
Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul
2024
The permeable nature of the translucent fabric represents the idea of memory, because the memory is not always crystal clear.
It blurs the boundary between interior and exterior, and it brings exterior into your piece.
When you are inside of my fabric architecture you also become a part of the piece.
Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home
2013-2022
Both the fabric and the rubbings work the same way.
It’s all about transporting the space into the other unrelated spaces.
The fabric and the rubbing complement each other.
They're feeding different information to each other.
What rubbing actually provides you is the texture of the surface.
Because I have to rub every inch of the room, it was more tactile and more physical.
And strangely enough, it brought so many ideas and vivid memories.
Do Ho is always kind of playing with this idea of fixity and what he sees as the fixity of museum structures, a work comes into the collection and then it falls under this sense of permanence.
The techniques that he uses that are incredibly intimate, they're very much of the body.
Rubbing/Loving:
Unit 2, 348 West 22nd street, New York, NY 10011, USA
2014 - 2023
The process of rubbing also manifests something else that is so essential to Do Ho’s practice, which is this idea that space and architectural space are never existing separately from the mind and the body.
The traces of use or movement through or co-existence become visible in the process of rubbing.
Our desire was really to think how to introduce to audiences the diversity of Do Ho’s material experiments.
That constant kind of oscillation and weaving together of deep rooted practices and truly the most cutting edge technologies that I learned so much.
Material’s usually led by concept or ideas.
I always try to pay attention to new technologies or new materials in order to realize unrealized ideas in my head.
Staircase
2016
Even in the works on paper, where he's using this gelatin paper that is usually used as a support for embroidery, but in fact, using it to collapse a three dimensional space onto a two dimensional plane.
Blueprint
2014
But also the thread drawings where he's literally embroidering into the paper.
I think it's a space for him to elaborate themes that recur and that he cycles back to throughout his practice.
So again, that sense of cyclical time that comes through so powerfully in the drawings.
Haunting home
2019
It’s kind of just about how we move through the world.
My Homes
2010
How the places that we've experienced and the people that we encounter shape us, and continue to shape us.
Wise Man
2023
Spectators
2023
Time Pockets
2021
If we think about the spiral in relation to what Do Ho says about the idea of the cyclical structure of time, then actually there's also something interesting to think about in relation to how we exist in community, in a lineage and that sense of responsibility toward those who might come after.
Who Am We?(Multicoloured)
2000
The wallpaper work, Who Am We? that is made up of small scale photographs from sources like school yearbook that Do Ho collected over the years, is now installed as the entrance graphic of the exhibition.
The idea is that it's not immediately recognized.
It thinks through this idea of blending in.
And act as a kind of second skin to the museum architecture and infrastructure.
This idea of also looking again together and rethinking older works was an unexpected, but really, really fascinating part of the exhibition making process.
So there was a prototype for Public Figures that was first made in the 90s in New York.
He's always had this desire to make it kinetic.
I call it Counter Monument series.
I thought that to bring in Public Figures, the monument is deemed to be permanent and immobile.
Making that mobile is actually an interesting gesture.
I’m grateful to actually realize that project after 35 years.
Public Figures
2025
Do Ho often talks about the idea that every show, every work within that show, no matter when it was created, is site-specific and is somehow rethought for the exhibition.
A work that traditionally is seen as an enclosed room, which he produced in response to the Gwangju Uprising and the suppression of those uprisings in 1980, where he went through and rubbed the entire room of a theaterthat is traditionally an enclosed space.
Rubbind/loving:
Company Housing of Gwangju Theater
2012
For this exhibition, he unfolded the work and showed it anew, as a kind of two dimensional work, in ways that one might not have expected.
The exhibition is an open plan.
There's no walls or partitions.
So it's going to be really up to the viewers how to make the associations among them.
Home Within Home (1/9 Scale)
2025
We were keen to create an experience that would feel very open, very porous, and that would in some ways sort of mimic the processes of memory as well.
Over the years, as I was moving from one place to the other, I have witnessed so many involuntary displacements, because of the political reasons or economical reasons, war.
Robin Hood Gardens, Woolmore street, London, E14 0HG
2018
Every country has been facing housing crisis.
Dong In Apartments
2022
So I'm very aware of those situations while my work starts from my personal experiences.
Bridge Project
1999 - ongoing
There's one work in the show; the Bridge Project.
It is this totally speculative exercise into how Do Ho could create a series of bridges that would connect Seoul, London and New York.
Perfect Home S.O.S (Smallest Occupiable Shelter)
2024
What was so extraordinary about that project was the amount of conversation and input that Do Ho wanted from us as curators, from collaborators.
So the idea that this is a constantly evolving thing that is made richer through collaboration, I think, is so much at the heart of how Do Ho works.
This project evolves as I go.
And it doesn't have final destination.
It's not the progression from my personal interest to these much wider issues. It’s been always there.
Artists reorient our attention towards aspects of the world that we're inhabiting but maybe are not attuned to, but they are usually so attuned to these societal shifts out in the world, and perceive them sometimes before we can, and perceive ways through them as well before many of us can.
That sense of relationality is really also at the core of his practice.
He sees some of his works as only coming alive or really only being complete when they're activated by visitors.
It's not just that spaces embed themselves in us, we have an imprint that we create out in the world.
We're living in a three dimensional world and I'm a visual artist.
So it is really important to make something visual from my conceptual ideas.
Because it's your reaction to the rest of the world.
It becomes real and personal when you actually bring that element into your practice.