Damien Hirst’s “Spot Work” (1986) / Courtesy of the artist and Science Ltd.
The Nationwide Museum of Fashionable and Up to date Artwork, Korea (MMCA) is launching a brand new annual blockbuster exhibition collection, “World Focus,” devoted to modern heavyweights who’ve helped form the worldwide artwork scene of the twenty first century.
The announcement comes on the heels of a record-breaking yr for the state-run museum, which welcomed an all-time excessive of three.46 million guests. A lot of that surge was fueled by the runaway success of Australian sculptor Ron Mueck’s solo present, which alone drew greater than 530,000 guests.
As a part of the collection, MMCA will highlight Damien Hirst and Do Ho Suh in 2026.
Hirst’s exhibition in March — his first large-scale solo presentation in Asia — is ready to characteristic greater than 50 items spanning his profession, together with his iconic works from “Pure Historical past,” with its animals suspended in formaldehyde tanks, to “For the Love of God,” the platinum forged of a human cranium bejeweled with hundreds of diamonds, alongside some never-before-seen objects.
Nationwide Museum of Fashionable and Up to date Artwork, Korea (MMCA) Director Kim Sung-hee speaks throughout a press convention on the museum in central Seoul, Tuesday, the place she introduced the most important tasks in addition to the museum’s exhibition lineup for 2026. Newsis
As to why the general public museum selected to deal with Hirst — a determine as influential as he’s polarizing, and whose relevance has at occasions been questioned — at this second, MMCA Director Kim Sung-hee pointed to the British artist’s constant interrogation of humanity’s relationship with demise, the will to beat it, the capital that feeds on that want and the social techniques that legitimize such forces underneath the guise of science and progress.
“Via performance-like stunts, he has repeatedly dismantled and overturned these constructions,” she stated at a New 12 months press convention in Seoul, Tuesday, including that the exhibition seeks to reexamine these aspects of his observe for the viewers right here.
Behind the blockbuster scale of the present lies a practical institutional purpose. Priced on the museum’s highest admission price of 5,000 received or extra, these large-scale exhibitions are designed to generate income that flows again into the general public coffers and will be reinvested in future packages. Final yr’s Ron Mueck exhibition, as an illustration, introduced in an estimated 2.5 billion received in ticket gross sales, sufficient to offset a lot of its roughly 3 billion received finances.
Throughout Korea’s busy September artwork season, a complete retrospective of Suh will take over the establishment. The present affords a multidimensional survey of his observe, centered on concepts of residence, displacement and belonging. Alongside his signature translucent architectural installations drawn from private historical past, a considerable physique of Suh’s drawings is being introduced for the primary time in Korea.
Kim Beom’s “Untitled” (1995) / Courtesy of MMCA
On the coronary heart of MMCA’s solo present program is an effort to revisit Korean trailblazers whose reputations have but to totally meet up with their creative achievement: modernist painter Lee Dai-won, summary sculptor Park Suk-won and Paris-based painter Bang Hai-ja.
That spirit of reassessment extends to thematic exhibitions that hint totally different constellations in Korean artwork. “Korean Artists in France, Fifties–Nineteen Seventies” brings collectively some 50 artists — together with Kim Tschang-yeul, Moon Shin, Rhee Seund-ja and Lee Ung-no — who relocated to Paris and solid their very own visible languages in a land removed from residence.
“This Is (Not) Conceptual Artwork” turns to the Nineteen Nineties to look at the nation’s personal tackle conceptualism that privileged concepts and language over materials type. That includes works by 20 artists similar to Kim Beom, Gimhongsok and Ahn Kyu-chul, the present maps how conceptual methods developed inside a neighborhood context.
