Do Ho Suh is a renowned and established artist from South Korea, who was represented at the Venice Biennale in 2001. He often undermines conventional perceptions of space in his sculptures and installations, using the viewer’s experience to interrogate concepts of power and collective identity via spatial embodiments of memory and home. This is evident in his 2025 installation for Tate Modern, Walk the House, which continues his signature series of recreations of domestic spaces he has known. Challenging ideas of home and permanence, Do Ho Suh draws attention to the malleability and transportability of environments, thereby producing what this paper argues is a liminoid architecture. Drawing on Victor Turner’s distinctions between liminal and liminoid, Do Ho Suh’s Tate exhibition explores the intermittent and fragmentary nature of memory, which the gallery visitor can experience as a state in which thresholds are never crossed, and arrival is indefinitely postponed. This paper challenges two common theoretical approaches to Suh’s work: Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, which articulates meaning via material environments that allow the individual to dwell in a place, a privileged space presupposing a sedentary inhabitant, and Auge’s explorations of non-space, the rhetorical territory created in contemporary society by cultural, transpersonal forces. For Auge, these annihilate individuality, resist imprinting, whilst promising identity. This paper aims to develop a more incisive ethno–analysis; a vocabulary for Suh’s work, and for his critique of the valorisation of the transitory over the intransigence of heimweh.

Authors:
Mie Al-Missned, Independent Scholar, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Mie Al-Missned is an independent art historian based in Doha, Qatar. She holds a PhD from the University of Exeter and an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and works on ritual theory, memory, and the spaces of home and displacement in con

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