Do Ho Suh’s “Nest/s” (2024) / Courtesy of Do Ho Suh Studio
The yr 2026 brings a crowded artwork calendar and a widened discipline of view. Throughout Seoul, museums are turning to Korean masters and internationally lively up to date artists, whereas new exhibitions look at queer artwork via the lens of town’s personal histories and neighborhoods.
New establishments are additionally becoming a member of the scene, together with Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul, whereas the most important biennales — Venice, Gwangju and Busan — return to anchor the yr.
Korean masters in focus
Main museums this yr are dedicating solo exhibitions to established Korean artists, alongside contemporaries with sturdy worldwide profiles.
In September, as town enters its annual peak artwork season with Frieze Seoul, Do Ho Suh and Koo Jeong-a will take heart stage.
A complete survey of Suh’s follow will probably be mounted on the Nationwide Museum of Fashionable and Modern Artwork (MMCA), Seoul. Lengthy involved with concepts of dwelling, displacement and belonging, his work typically takes the type of delicately constructed installations that replicate architectural areas drawn from his private historical past. Utilizing translucent cloth and different supplies, Suh recreates corridors, staircases and rooms at full scale, inviting viewers to bodily transfer via them.
Koo follows her illustration of the Korean Pavilion on the 2024 Venice Biennale with an exhibition centered on notion. Working with intangible media similar to scents and magnetic fields, she creates environments that subtly disrupt the viewer’s sensory order. On the Leeum Museum of Artwork, her work will prolong past the gallery into the museum’s foyer and different surprising corners.
Kim Yun-shin’s wood sculptures on view on the 2024 Venice Biennale’s Worldwide Artwork Exhibition / Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin and Kukje Gallery
In March, the Hoam Museum of Artwork in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, will stage the primary blockbuster retrospective of nonagenarian sculptor Kim Yun-shin. Carving straight into wooden chunks with chainsaws, she produces freestanding assemblages with natural, virtually primal, varieties paying homage to sprouting crops or totem poles. Along with her signature sculptural collection, the exhibition contains early prints and work to supply a fuller view of her 70-year profession.
The Seoul Museum of Artwork (SeMA) will mark the a hundred and tenth anniversary of Yoo Younger-kuk’s beginning with the most important retrospective of the artist’s work thus far. A pioneer of Korean abstraction, Yoo is greatest identified for distilling the nation’s pure landscapes into basic components of dots, traces, planes and coloration. The Could present will present an in-depth have a look at his oeuvre, together with beforehand unseen items.
Yoo Younger-kuk’s “Work” (1967) / Courtesy of Yoo Youngkuk Artwork Basis
Worldwide heavyweights
Alongside homegrown abilities, a roster of distinguished worldwide figures is ready to enliven town’s artwork calendar all year long.
Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” (2007) / Courtesy of the artist
The MMCA will current a large-scale retrospective of British artist Damien Hirst in March — the primary of its type in Asia. From animals preserved in formaldehyde to show circumstances with tablets and surgical devices, Hirst’s artwork confronts uneasy questions on dying, immortality and human want. Provocative by design, he has lengthy occupied a polarizing place inside the up to date artwork world.
In February, the Leeum Museum of Artwork turns its consideration to Tino Sehgal, whose follow rejects materials objects in favor of stay encounters. Constructed round what he calls “constructed conditions,” his works take form via choreographed interactions and exist solely in that second. The Seoul exhibition will embrace a site-specific stay piece created via his reimagining of the museum’s personal assortment.
One other artist making his solo debut in Korea is Jonas Wooden. Recognized for transforming on a regular basis interiors and landscapes, Wooden makes use of daring patterns, compressed views and saturated coloration to rework acquainted areas into fastidiously staged compositions. His September present on the Amorepacific Museum of Artwork will collect greater than 80 works, together with work, prints and wallpaper.
Jonas Wooden’s “Bball Studio” (2021) / Courtesy of the artist
Reframing the once-marginalized
Artwork Sonje Heart is kicking off the yr with a big exhibition inspecting LGBTQ+ practices lengthy located outdoors the mainstream. “Spectrosynthesis Seoul,” opening in March, brings collectively works by greater than 70 artists to contemplate up to date queer artwork via Seoul’s particular cultural contexts — from the neighborhoods that formed Korean queer subcultures to micro-histories left undocumented amid town’s breakneck modernization.
A reassessment of feminine trailblazers uncared for inside artwork historical past narratives may also be foregrounded. On the Leeum Museum of Artwork, a gaggle exhibition in Could gathers first-generation girls artists from around the globe, together with Judy Chicago and Tsuruko Yamazaki, to spotlight their early immersive environments that invite guests’ sensory engagement.
Set up view of the recreated “Feather Room” (1966) by Judy Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol and Eric Orr
(The Room Firm) at Haus der Kunst Munchen in Germany / Courtesy of Haus der Kunst Munchen
Rhee Seund-ja’s “A World with out Impediment” (1968) / Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai
In February, Arario Gallery Seoul will put forth a large-scale survey of Park Younger-sook’s works. Park’s photographic follow from the Nineteen Sixties, similar to her “Mad Girls Undertaking,” foregrounded the feminine physique to problem patriarchal energy constructions.
White Dice and Gallery Hyundai flip the highlight this yr on Rhee Seund-ja, considered Korea’s solely feminine first-generation abstractionist. In 2024, her solo present was mounted as an official collateral occasion of the Venice Biennale.
Gallery Hyundai may also spotlight the work of Christine Solar Kim in September. Drawing on her lived expertise as a Deaf artist navigating a hearing-centered world, Kim explores sound via the physique, American Signal Language, musical notation and infographics. Her oeuvre reveals how which means is mediated and sometimes distorted throughout totally different methods of communication.
New museums, returning biennales
This yr brings a brand new constellation of artwork establishments to the capital. Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul, the satellite tv for pc outpost of the long-lasting Parisian museum, will open in Could contained in the 63 Sq. skyscraper in Yeouido, following an preliminary delay to the venture.
One other addition arrives within the first half of the yr with the Search engine marketing-Seoul Museum of Artwork, a department of SeMA in western Seoul devoted to efficiency and media artwork, constructed as a part of the establishment’s broader community.
Biennales may also return, bringing a way of anticipation. The 61st Venice Biennale begins on Could 9, with its flagship Worldwide Artwork Exhibition unfolding underneath the theme, “In Minor Keys.” The present was conceived by Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh earlier than her sudden passing final yr.
In Venice, the Korean Pavilion facilities on the thought of “Fortress and Nest.” Curated by Binna Choi, the exhibition brings collectively works by Choi Go-en and Ro Hye-ree, proposing a Twenty first-century “house of liberation” that reframes social unrest as a extra inclusive type of power.
Park Younger-sook’s “Scene 24” (1965) / Courtesy of Arario Gallery
Again on dwelling floor, Korea’s two headliner biennales each return in September. The Gwangju Biennale, Asia’s longest-running survey of up to date artwork, has named Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen as its inventive director. His version will discover how “the follow of inventive transformation resonates with Gwangju’s legacy of democratic change.”
The Busan Biennale’s upcoming version is collectively led by Amal Khalaf and Evelyn Simons and centered across the theme, “Dissident Refrain,” suggesting a polyphonic gathering of voices in opposition to the port metropolis’s backdrop.
