Korean Artist Do Ho Suh to Take Over the Guggenheim in First Major New York Solo Show
The installation, which will open in early 2027, has been dubbed a “love letter to New York City”
The Guggenheim will present its first major museum exhibition early next year in dedication to Korean artist Do Ho Suh. Spanning more than three decades of his practice, the presentation, “I Dream in Another Language,” will feature drawings, sculptures, and large-scale installations that intimately explore how we move through different places, carry memories, and build communities.
The exhibition will also debut “Rubbing/Loving: Apartment A and B, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2014–26),” which will invite visitors to enter a full-scale reproduction of Suh’s former home in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, which he occupied for nearly 20 years.
“In 1997 I began renting a half-basement studio apartment in Chelsea,” Suh said. “That space remains the home I have lived in the longest throughout my life. To debut the rubbings I made of that building’s interiors at the Guggenheim, in the city I called home for so long, is poignant, as well as conceptually interesting for me. My work is as concerned with space and movement as it is [with] roots or home. New York brought so many of my ideas into focus and I remain indebted to the city always.”
“I dream in another language” will comprise of more than 50 existing and new works, drawn from loans and the Guggenheim New York collection. The exhibition will also trace Suh’s sustained investigation of the body and, by extension, of architecture as both a physical structure and a psychological space that holds individual experiences and collective imagination.
“Suh’s work possesses a poetic capacity to move beyond the particularities and limitations of any specific language, culture, or knowledge, speaking to a human condition that anyone who encounters it can recognize,” said Asian Art Initiative Curator Kyung An. “It offers a picture of what it means to course through this world as one, as other, and as us. It feels particularly apt that the New York ‘Rubbing/Loving’ installation will have its world premiere at the Guggenheim. ‘Rubbing/Loving’ is a work about arriving and leaving, loving and mourning. It is a love letter to New York.”
Suh’s drawings and works on paper will also appear throughout the four galleries, including examples of his distinctive technique of transferring stitched lines on water-soluble sheets into wet paper pulp, where the threads become embedded in the paper itself. Additionally, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Guggenheim, featuring scholarly essays, a short story, and writings by the artist.
“The exhibition’s title points to multiple ways of being and of understanding as we live across geographies, histories and systems.” Suh added. “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.”
“I Dream in Another Language” will open in February 2027.