Do Ho Suh speaks to The Telegraph

“As soon as we’re born,” says Do Ho Suh, “without knowing it, we’re influenced by the architecture and the objects that we’re surrounded by.” The Korean artist has taken a break from installing Walk the House, a three-decade survey of his work at Tate Modern, to explain to me the ideas that underpin his delicate, apparition-like installations. These huge, yet seemingly weightless, hanging works – fashioned from gauzy, coloured polyester or paper – recreate, at one-to-one scale, the architecture of some of the many places Suh has called home, in Korea, the US and elsewhere.

Now 62, Suh has something of the monk about him: with shaven head and round-rimmed glasses, he is the kind of unassuming character one could imagine contemplating the essence of things in a sparsely furnished study, or else embarking on an itinerant life, in which home is nowhere and everywhere. It’s certainly an image that fits with his sculptures, which seem to embody a philosophical paradox. On the one hand, in their meticulous rendering of every cornice and architrave, every skirting board and doorknob, light switch, plug socket, window frame, sconce, shelf, hinge and air conditioning, they feel like a love letter to the concrete reality of ­everyday life. On the other, they are fearfully fragile, barely there at all: like a memory that has taken on just enough tangible form to come back from the past. No wonder they’re often described as “ghosts”.

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Image: Portrait of Do Ho Suh

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