Do Ho Suh's First Major New York Museum Show Re-Creates His Chelsea Apartments at Full Scale
Over several years, Do Ho Suh covered the interiors of his two former Chelsea apartments with paper and rubbed their surfaces with pastel and colored pencil. The result, Rubbing/Loving, a walk-through installation that re-creates both units at full scale, has its world premiere at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in I dream in another language | Do Ho Suh, the first major solo museum exhibition in New York dedicated to the Seoul-born artist.
348 West 22nd Street
Suh lived and worked in the two units for nearly 20 years. The work carries the address in its full title, Rubbing/Loving: Apartment A and B, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, and is dated 2014 to 2026. Apartment A is made of colored pencil on paper, Alucore, and a steel and aluminum framework.
"In 1997 I began renting a half-basement studio apartment in Chelsea. That space remains the home I have lived in the longest throughout my life," Suh said.
The same address runs through his works on paper. For pieces such as Main Entrance, 348 West 22nd Street (2016), he transfers stitched threads into wet paper pulp, where they become embedded in the sheet itself.
Passageways and Closets
The show gathers more than 50 existing and new works from more than three decades, drawn from loans and from the Guggenheim's own collection, which holds two works by Suh. One is Closet-I (2003), in polyester and powder-coated stainless steel. Hubs, a series begun in 2011, joins corridors and entrances from his former homes and studios into translucent fabric passageways.
From Seoul to London
Suh, born in Seoul in 1962, studied at Seoul National University before moving to the United States in 1991 to earn a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA at Yale. He represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Recent solo exhibitions include Tate Modern in London in 2025 and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in 2026 and 2027. His work is in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney. He now lives and works in London.
Drawings in Four Galleries
Drawings and works on paper appear throughout the exhibition's four galleries. New works from Fatherhood, a body of work begun in 2011 about how memory is tended and transmitted between generations, join the earlier pieces. Suh has said: "As someone who has had to wrestle with language, I do not take meaning for granted. In the same way, I do not take what we see for granted."
The exhibition is organized by Kyung An, the Guggenheim's curator for its Asian Art Initiative. A Guggenheim catalogue will include scholarly essays, a short story and writings by the artist.
I dream in another language | Do Ho Suh runs February 19 to August 1, 2027, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York.
