Do Ho Suh at MMCA Seoul: how transparent homes and a pocket-lined coat hold memory
Around 500 works run through February 9, 2027, from thread drawings to architectural rubbings and portable fabric spaces. The complete Apartment A has a separate presentation starting December 18.
Can a home be folded up and carried away? Do Ho Suh’s exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul brings together around 500 drawings, sculptures, videos and installations, moving from previously unseen early works to ongoing projects. The main exhibition runs August 27, 2026–February 9, 2027, across basement galleries 3, 4 and 5 and the second-floor MMCA Studio. Beyond transparent rooms, its deeper subject is how the body remembers places it has lived.
Start at Seed Bank, where lines grow into space
The entrance corridor’s Seed Bank gathers childhood carvings, student experiments and works made before moving to America, returning familiar concerns with home and migration to their beginnings. Gallery 3 extends from Small Gate to roughly 200 drawings, including thread drawings developed with Singapore’s STPI since 2009. Threads embedded in handmade paper fibres give lines depth within the sheet, approaching a small, soft architecture rather than merely drawing on its surface.
Born in Seoul in 1962, Suh moved to the United States in 1991; life in Seoul, America and Europe subsequently became a thread through his work. Rather than separating cities into disconnected chapters, the exhibition lets early and recent works, body and home, illuminate one another. Examine how lines make space in paper, then compare full-sized rooms. This is not simply a one-way relationship between sketch and finished work, but different scales of the same question about memory.
Gallery 4’s Rubbing/Loving attaches paper to architecture, repeatedly rubbing graphite and coloured pencil to record walls, doors, windows and minute irregularities. Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home, made over 2013–2022, preserves physical traces of the childhood hanok; the Gwangju Theater housing project extends private remembrance into collective preservation. The Seoul Home photograph shows its 2022 Sydney presentation, not the identical arrangement in the current Seoul galleries.
Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home documented in Sydney in 2022.
Gallery 5 reconstructs homes in translucent polyester and stainless steel. Perfect Home layers a London residence with handles, sockets and switches from other cities; Nest/s, over 21 metres long, links door frames from different homes. At 1:1 scale, the distance a shoulder passes through a doorway or a hand reaches a switch matters. Once architecture becomes light, it is no longer only an immovable address: it carries the outlines of life like luggage.
Perfect Home layers domestic details in translucent textiles.Nest/s links coloured spaces along more than 21 metres.
Home returns to the body, with a separate December display
Memory of Love, first shown in MMCA Studio, collaborates with sustainable fashion brand RE;CODE. Pockets from family members’ old clothes are sewn inside the artist’s coat, holding small objects of shared memory. Instead of a home one enters, this is a collection one wears. Clothing once close to another body and pockets carrying traces of use turn family relationships from large-scale architecture into intimate storage.
Memory of Love sews family clothing pockets inside a coat.
Official main-exhibition admission is KRW8,000. MMCA Seoul is at 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, normally open 10am–6pm and until 9pm Wednesdays and Saturdays. The complete Apartment A is separately planned for Seoul Box from December 18 to March 28, 2027; it was not fully available from the main show’s opening. Visitors seeking large fabric stairs should distinguish that schedule, while those following thread drawings, rubbings and clothing can read the main exhibition through these three scales.
Earlier work image of Apartment A’s textile apartment and stairs.
