In conjunction with the exhibition Do Ho Suh, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents Do Ho Suh: On Site, a program of documentary films that record the sites of the artist’s works, offering a multidimensional perspective on his oeuvre. Centered on Suh’s artistic attitude, the films trace the process by which a work comes into being through relationships that weave together space and people, from site-specific installations around the world that could not be brought into the exhibition, to works grounded in diverse collaborations.
The program first introduces the making of public artworks created for specific places. In-Between Hotel parked in the alleys and parking lots of Gwangju, run amid the hospitality of its neighbors. Karma, a large bronze sculpture, was cast and erected outdoors at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Other works posed the formidable structural challenge of moving an entire house. In Fallen Star, commissioned for the Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego, a house modeled on a modest New England cottage in Rhode Island, where the artist first lived as a student, perches on the engineering building. It looks as if it had ridden a tornado across the continent from the East Coast and landed there. Bridging Home, Liverpool and Bridging Home, London show a hanok, resembling the house where the artist was born and raised, descending precariously into the city centers of different cultures. The negotiations these works undergo with their host cities reveal the social consensus involved in bringing a house, as a work of art, into an unfamiliar place. The films also capture the engineering that stretches the limits of building technology, and the tenacity of the institutions behind it, as they realize the details of a work that looks as if it had “fallen from the sky.”
Moving Homes, in which the artist shares his thinking on “fabric architecture,” his long-standing pursuit. The film gathers the moments when houses built of translucent fabric unfold at Leeum Museum of Art, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and MMCA. Also introduced are 30 Avenue Montaigne: Façade + Passage + Dior, modeled on the Maison Dior, the Parisian fashion house; Staircase, the red fabric staircase installed at Tate Modern; and Proposal for Sach’ŏnwang-sa, commissioned by Bloomberg Space.Following the artist as he traces the lineage of his fabric architecture back millennia at the site of the old temple in Gyeongju, said to have been built of “colourful silk,” viewers encounter the tradition of “walking the house,” the relocation of a hanok, realized in the artist’s own way. Equally fascinating is the artist's mastery of new techniques and materials: STPI records his experiments in making thread drawings with water-soluble gelatin tissue alongside the artisans of a Singapore workshop, while Portal documents the arduous process of realizing a negative architecture that combines 3D scanning, CNC milling, casting and traditional Korean timber joinery.
Two films by anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody⸺Doreen Nutaaq Simmonds and A Bridge to Where?⸺deepen a crucial aspect of the most recent iteration of Bridge Project (1999– ), Do Ho Suh’s ongoing search for a “perfect home.” The project imagines bridges linking Seoul, New York and London, the three places the artist has called home. Where the bridges intersect, in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, lies the site of that perfect home. To give form to this speculative work, Suh has collaborated with experts in architecture, engineering, biology, philosophy and beyond. Brody pictures what the artist’s ‘perfect home’ might actually be like through the Arctic’s white nights, its winters of minus sixty degrees, the aurora and the sea ice. Through the Iñupiaq elder Doreen Nutaaq Simmonds, he introduces the Indigenous community of the region, awakening us to the impact of global colonialism and the climate crisis upon it.
“I was just a catalyst or a conduit to give them an opportunity to do something like this and at the end of the day I hope they will go home with good feelings of some kind of fulfillment. … I often think that this art, work of art, is some kind of excuse, and then the more important thing is how you reach that goal.” (Do Ho Suh, from the documentary Fallen Star)
The films in Do Ho Suh: On Site include scenes in which those who “built the house together,” joining the artist in the making of his works, open up about homes of their own. Perhaps this is because their stories touch on the universal passages of life: leaving the house one has lived in, and the shifting of family ties. Moving between cultures, Suh’s work rigorously probes the feelings that lie between “home” and “homeless-ness,” carrying reflections on longing and belonging to which anyone can relate. Through this screening program, viewers will go beyond understanding the context surrounding Suh’s work to witness the many hands and hearts at work on its sites.
Conversations
Conversation 1. Walking the Hanok
Jeon Bonghee (Professor, Department of Architecture, Seoul National University), Nam Sung-Teag (Professor, Hangyang University School of Architecture)
Fri, Dec 11, 2026, 15:00 ~ 16:30, following the screening of Program 2
Conversation 2. Bridge Project
Kang Hyeong-gu (Professor of Philosophy of Science, Mokpo National University), Kyong Park (Professor Emeritus of Public Culture, University of California San Diego)
Sat, Dec 12, 2026, 18:00 ~ 19:30, following the screening of Program 4
Conversation 3. Moving Homes
Chun Young-Paik (Professor, Department of Art History, Hongik University), Wonji Seol (Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)
Wed, Dec 16, 2026, 15:00 ~ 17:00, following the screening of Program 6
※ Conversations are open to ticket holders of the corresponding screening programs.
※ Live Korean captions will be provided for all three conversations.
※ Conversation 2 will be interpreted consecutively between Korean and English. Conversations 1 and 3 will be held in Korean only.
