2nd May 2025 - DHS and his home sweet home
Looking at Walk the House at Tate Modern (Suh 2025), I was immediately moved by the strange familiarity of the spaces Do Ho Suh stitched together. The corridors and staircases constructed in translucent fabric do not function as replicas of his past homes. They are spaces made of memory, stitched not only from thread but from accumulated, ghost-like impressions of inhabitation. “Memory is not just about recollection,” Suh says in the Tate Etc. interview, “but about the passage through.” That passage, through doorways, into thresholds, across boundaries, becomes the artwork itself.
In my project, I’ve been thinking of home not as a fixed location but as a structure built through movement and conversation. Suh's rooms echo this fluidity. They resist finality. The viewer does not simply observe the work, but instead enters it, dwells in it temporarily, and exits changed. In Suh’s words: “These spaces are like a garment you can wear… they move with you.”
The transparency of Suh’s installation also resonates with how I use digital textures and objects as fragments of spaces that no longer entirely exist. The homes are visible yet insubstantial, much like memories carried in migration. Suh does not try to reconstruct his past, but instead builds a “transportable memory,” as one of the exhibition texts puts it. That phrase has stayed with me. It captures the friction I feel in trying to reconstruct others’ narratives of home, not to preserve them, but to let them be carried, worn, and reshaped within the digital terrain of the digital space.
What struck me most was how Suh treats home as an ongoing negotiation. His works are not static memorials but spaces of breath and transformation. I see my installation in a similar way, not as a static archive, but as a shared, living conversation shaped by each participant’s presence. Suh offers a structure for how we might build memory, not by fixing it but by allowing it to shift. His work affirms that memory is not housed. It moves. It expands. It dwells.