Do Ho Suh: Breathing Home | Recent Drawings

‘Drawing is my way of working through the psychology of my practice. A lot of these works are meditations on ideas that have followed me throughout my life – they speak to the core of my work and thinking. And in some cases, they are more literal meditations – drawing is very bound up in breathing and chanting practices for me.’ – Do Ho Suh

Highlighting the foundational role and varied forms that drawing plays in Do Ho Suh's art, the exhibition features a range of his works on paper, including drawings completed in graphite, watercolour and pigment marker, as well as his unique 'thread' drawings, all completed over the past year.

Across his career, Do Ho Suh's engagement with drawing has been as manifold as it has been consistent. From simple sketches in pencil and watercolour to complex 'thread' drawings, in which cotton thread is embedded in handmade paper - newly conceived on a small scale - this exhibition showcases his collaborative methodology, innovative techniques and experimental use of materials, foregrounding the expansive role of drawing in his art.

Both generative and reflective, for Suh drawing functions variously: as a point of inception for the germination of new ideas; as a way of progressing themes and concepts to become distinct bodies of work; as a means of harnessing the processes and techniques that are employed in his celebrated one-to-one scale architectural sculptures. Suh's sketchbooks play a crucial role in shaping his work, serving as both laboratory and journal. Their pages offer a place to draw, explore and extrapolate while expanding and illustrating the philosophical, speculative and seemingly impossible ideas at play.     

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, 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. 

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.  

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.  

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.

New MACK publication - Do Ho Suh: Anatomy

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. 

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, Tate Modern, 1 May-26 October 2025

A major survey exhibition exploring the breadth and depth of Do Ho Suh's inventive and unique practice over the last three decades, including new and site-specific works on display for the first time. On view at Tate Modern, London, 1 May-19 October 2025.