There are prices to be paid for these rapid advances. One of them is the degree of regimentation and conformity demanded of ordinary people. Suh acknowledges this in a work called Uni-Form/s, Self-Portrait/s (My 39 Years) (2006), which consists of a clothing rack, on which he has hung all the uniforms he had to wear, from his earliest school days to his time in the army. With each new ‘skin’ came a new, pre-determined identity.

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The irony is that the military-style school uniforms are heavily influenced by Japanese models, a legacy of the period when Korea was under its neighbour’s yoke. Although the wounds of this time have never properly healed, it’s surprising how much Japanese influence has been internalised into local society and culture.

When he went to study in the United States in the early 1990s, Suh had to reassess his understanding of the world, an experience he describes as “receiving a new set of eyes”. He has preserved his rented apartment from those days in a suite of translucent fabric sculptures – a toilet, a wash basin, a stove, a medicine cabinet. In later years he would make extensive rubbings of his New York studio, recording the actual dimensions of the space on giant sheets of paper.

One of most impressive aspects of this show is Suh’s readiness to move from the smallest drawings, such as A Perfect Home (1999) – which resembles a child’s drawing of a house, standing at the halfway point of a bridge stretching between Korea and America – to the voluminous installation, Staircase-III (2010), which occupies an entire gallery. The staircase, made from red fabric, drops down from a false ceiling made from the same material. We stand at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at an imaginary room, noting the careful detail of the balustrades glimpsed at the top.

It’s not a stairway to heaven but a ladder to a private memory chamber. We’re invited to peer upwards from the floor, but never ascend.

In the major work in the exhibition, six separate rooms (or ‘hubs’) made from different coloured fabrics are linked together as one long passage, allowing us to travel between different homes, cities and time periods as we walk from one end of the installation to the other. The lure is so seductive that even though every bit of the installation is visible from the outside, you’ll find a long queue of viewers lined up, eager to experience the bodily sensation of being within the space.

A constant preoccupation for Suh is that trope, beloved of the ancient Greeks, of the One and the Many. His most astonishing installation consists of a room with a pale brown speckled wallpaper and a flat, glassy platform for a floor. It’s only when one gets close that the wallpaper – Who Am We? (Multicoloured) (2000) – resolves itself into thousands of tiny faces, while the floor – Floor (1997-2000) – is revealed as a ceiling held up by thousands of minuscule figures.

The same figures recur in Public Figures – Model (2000), a short, animated video and a sculpture. We watch a bronze statue of a great man decompose into a swarm of tiny figures, who slide down the plinth, pick it up and move it through the park. It’s a double-edged comment on the nature of political fame, born of public adulation, which is returned by the oppressions of state power.

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Suh’s most recently finished piece is probably the highlight of the show. The Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013-22) is a full-scale graphite rubbing of the exterior of Suh’s childhood home, a house built in the traditional Korean style by his artist father. Suh has worked on this project on and off for nine years, only finishing in August. The task was so hands-on, he wore away his own fingerprints making the rubbings.

The scale and duration of this project is a testament to Suh’s determination, but there’s something touching about his efforts to preserve his father’s legacy, which was itself a reassertion of the value of a traditional Korean culture. The work embodies nostalgia for a lost childhood, but also for a set of values that has been overwritten by the globalising activities of the modern era. It’s a reminder that for everything that is gained in terms of progress and prosperity, something else is lost. It’s the same with a nation and with an individual life. When we forget our sense of home, Suh seems to say, we lose the very heart of our identity, the thing that sets us apart from the crowd.

Do Ho Suh shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art until February 26, 2023.

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