Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. © Do Ho Suh
When Do Ho Suh was a young boy in Seoul in the 1970s, his father decided to build a family home based on a hanok – a traditional Korean timber house with a curved tiled roof. The one he chose as his model stood in the gardens of the imperial palace and had been built for King Sunjo in 1878.
“My father was a painter who had modernised Korean art,” says Suh, “but, as the country was rapidly moving towards westernisation, he became obsessed with the idea that he could live like a scholar from an older time. For him, it was a way to preserve certain traditional virtues and practices that were fast disappearing.”
