SEOUL.- The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea presents a large-scale solo exhibition of Do Ho Suh, a key figure in Korean contemporary art, at MMCA Seoul from Thursday, 27 August 2026, through Tuesday, 9 February 2027.

The exhibition is organized to offer a comprehensive survey of the artist’s practice, which has continually expanded in scope over four decades, establishing a distinctive presence both in Korea and on the international stage. It is the largest exhibition of Suh’s work to date.

Do Ho Suh (b. 1962) has constructed a distinct artistic world through his inquiry into fundamental questions of the individual and the community, home and displacement, and memory and identity. Based on his experiences of growing up in Seoul and living in the United States and Europe, Suh explores the relationship between home, architecture, the body, and space through diverse media, including sculpture, installation, drawing, and video. Reflecting on constant relocation and shifting relationships, he has expanded his personal narrative into broader studies of human existence and identity, memory and place, and community and society. By transporting familiar spaces and objects to unfamiliar settings, Suh redefines home not as a fixed dwelling but as a space in which memory and experience accumulate and travel. By prompting contemplation on life and existence beyond the boundaries of any single place or culture, Suh’s art demonstrates the vital potential for Korean contemporary art to engage with the world.

Bringing together over 500 works of drawing, sculpture, video, and installation—from previously unseen works produced during the artist’s university years to signature works and ongoing projects—the exhibition offers a multidimensional view of Suh’s artistic journey and the evolution of his thinking. In particular, his fabric reconstructions of actual architectural spaces, alongside works that record the traces of everyday spaces and objects, invite a reconsideration of the ties between physical places and the memories accumulated within them, as well as between the individual and the community. By presenting works from different periods and locations along a single continuum, the exhibition reexamines the connections and variations that run throughout Suh’s oeuvre across time and space. Moving freely between works, visitors come to discover these connections for themselves, overlaying their own memories and experiences to generate new meaning.





The exhibition unfolds across Galleries 3, 4, and 5; communal spaces; and the MMCA Studio, with works from different periods and in different media arranged to form organic connections. Early and recent works, drawings and installations, the home and the body, and space and time reflect and infiltrate one another, revealing the evolution and deepening of the artist’s thinking.

The exhibition begins outside the galleries, in the corridor leading up to them. A large-scale structure bringing together childhood drawings and sculptures alongside works and records that predate the artist’s professional career illuminates Suh’s point of departure—an aspect rarely covered in previous exhibitions. This space, dedicated to the works and materials that later blossomed into the questions and experiments running through Suh’s practice, has been named the “Seed Bank.” The featured works—wooden carvings of sea creatures made in the yard of the artist’s childhood Hanok (Korean traditional house), his university graduation project, installation works made prior to studying abroad, and a range of experiments from his student years—reveal that Suh was pursuing formative investigations across the boundaries of the two- and three-dimensional, and between object and space, from an early age. These investigations, followed by the site-specific installations and early fabric works of his years studying in the United States, gradually concretized into a distinct formal language. Making their first public appearance in this exhibition, these early works already bear, in nascent form, the core concerns of Suh’s art that would later expand into questions of home, migration, memory, and relationship.

At the entrance to Gallery 3, visitors are met by Small Gate (2017), a reconstruction of the gate to the Hanok in Seongbuk-dong where the artist once lived. More than a threshold dividing inside from outside, this door opens the exhibition’s journey as a symbolic passage connecting different spaces and times. The roughly 200 drawings that follow move beyond simple records, charting the artist’s creative domain shaped by accumulated thought and experimentation. Since 2009, Suh has developed a new working method in collaboration with STPI, Singapore, using gelatin tissue and handmade paper, embedding thread within the paper’s fibers; this thread, absorbed into the paper, generates a sense of spatial depth, expanding drawing from a flat surface into a space with material presence. These pieces, the majority of which are being shown in Korea for the first time, range from delicate line work to rubbing-based drawings, offering a panoramic view of the imaginative world and history of formative exploration the artist has built up over many years.

Gallery 4 presents the signature series Rubbing/Loving, through which visitors can trace Suh’s distinctive approach to remembering and representing a place. The artist presses Hanji (Korean traditional paper) and paper against the surfaces of places he has left behind or that are soon to disappear—including the Hanok in Seongbuk-dong, Seoul—and rubs the surface with graphite and colored pencil to record its traces. Arising from the phonetic resemblance between the Korean pronunciations of “rubbing” and “loving,” these works go beyond reproducing the forms of domiciles to tactually reveal the time and memory accumulated by body and place together. While Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–2022)—described by the artist as a self-portrait of both his father and himself—captures personal and family memory, Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012) extends this into the memory and history of a collective. Through the collective act of Suh and a team tracing and rubbing the surface of a place together, the Gwangju project preserves the vestiges and time of a vanishing place, expanding into a practice of collective remembrance and mourning.





Gallery 5 contains major works at the core of Suh’s practice, providing a condensed understanding of the artistic inquiry he has pursued through numerous years. His most recent fabric work, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), superimposes architectural elements—door handles, outlets, switches—from the many homes he has lived in within a reconstruction of his current London apartment, unfolding an architectural autobiography within which discrete times and places intersect.

The Bridge Project, ongoing since 1999, began as an imagined bridge connecting Seoul and New York and later evolved to introduce a bridge from London, the artist’s home city. Developed in collaboration with architects, philosophers, anthropologists, and engineers, the project has expanded the question of “home” into one of global relationship and coexistence, encompassing society and the environment. This exhibition presents the project in its most expansive form yet, spanning both its history and its present.

The early work Who Am We? (2000) reduces portraits from the artist’s high school yearbooks, among other sources, to their smallest identifiable scale, rendering them as wallpaper filling a space 15 meters high to create a sweeping panorama. Appearing as a generic pattern from a distance yet revealing countless individual faces up close, this work, together with Floor (1997–2000), reflects Suh’s early reflection on the relationship between the collective and the individual, and the identity formed within it.

Floor, a gift from the artist to the MMCA, consists of countless miniature figures supporting a transparent platform. Walking across it, visitors experience firsthand a thread underlying Suh’s practice: the individual exists through connection and interdependence with countless others.

Exiting Gallery 5, visitors encounter the large-scale installation Nest/s (2024), measuring 22 meters in length. Drawing on the artist’s present and former residences and studios in Seoul, New York, London, Berlin, and other cities, the work joins the structures and forms of different places into a continuous sequence to create a new space that exists nowhere in reality, yet which visitors can physically experience.

Featured in the MMCA Studio are miniature, scaled models of the artist’s large-scale works, alongside pieces embodying a more personal experience. Here, the exhibition turns from Suh’s investigation of space toward his most fundamental relationship—family. The artist presents a series of intimate, personal works centered on the theme of fatherhood. Making its debut in this exhibition, Memory of Love (2026) attaches pockets cut from his family’s own clothing to the inside of the artist’s coat, placing cherished objects within them to form layers of memories shared with his family. Clothing becomes home, and home, having traveled the world, returns to the body—a cycle that distills Suh’s long-standing exploration of the relationships among body, clothing, and home.

Finally, Suh’s iconic work Apartment A, Unit 2, Corridor, and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2012) will be on view in the Seoul Box from 18 December 2026 through 28 March 2027. This marks the first time the work’s complete set of units is being shown together in a single place, and the Seoul Box’s soaring ceilings and open volume accommodate a full experience of the work’s architectural scale and structure.

Special educational programming has also been organized in conjunction with the exhibition. Designed to deepen visitors’ understanding of the artist’s practice and enhance engagement with the exhibition, the program runs intensively over four days from the opening day, Thursday, 27 August, through Sunday, 30 August. In partnership with STPI, the Singapore-based print and paper workshop with which Suh has long collaborated, the museum has also prepared a participatory program through which visitors can experience the thread drawing and cyanotype techniques featured in the exhibition. In addition, a public talk introduces the collaborative process between the artist and art fabricators involved in realizing his works. Registration and further details are available on the MMCA website.

Actor Park Bo Gum has lent his voice to the audio guide for this exhibition. Widely beloved for his warm and nuanced tones, Park serenely narrates the stories of home, migration, memory, and identity embedded in Suh’s work, guiding visitors toward a richer experience of the artist’s works. The audio guide featuring Park’s narration may be accessed free of charge through the museum’s exhibition guide app.

Following its presentation at MMCA Seoul, elements of the exhibition are scheduled to travel to major museums across Asia—the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in Japan and M+ in Hong Kong—where Suh’s oeuvre will be presented through exhibition formats and contexts shaped by each venue.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition, which sheds new light on Do Ho Suh’s work within the context of Korean contemporary art, stands as a significant occasion to further deepen research and discourse on his practice. It is my hope that his works will offer a meaningful opportunity for visitors to reflect anew on the world in which we live today and on human life itself.”