SEOUL ART NOW - Exhibition Highlights
Mark Bradford — ‘Keep Walking’
Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul
August 7, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Bradford’s large-scale survey unfolds as a dense topography of social memory. Layered canvases, paper fragments, and painted interventions map fractured histories of race, migration, and violence. The exhibition is structured less as chronology than as rhythm—oscillating between monumental canvases and taut, intimate works—forcing viewers to navigate a field where abstraction becomes political ground.
Antony Gormley
‘Drawing on Space’
Museum SAN, Wonju
June 20 – November 30, 2025
Set against Tadao Ando’s subterranean concrete dome, this exhibition unfolds across 48 works spanning sculpture, drawing, and installation. The centerpiece, Ground, conceived with Ando, anchors the show as a permanent spatial intervention. Suspended forms and cast figures probe the thresholds between body, void, and built environment.
‘Inextricable’
White Cube Seoul & Thaddaeus Ropac, Seoul
September 2 – October 18, 2025
The dual-gallery project splits Gormley’s practice into two registers. White Cube stages dense sculptural encounters with Blockworks and Bunker forms pressing against space, while Ropac offers the tensile geometries of Extended Strapworks and Open Blockworks. Together they articulate how the human body is now shaped, even disciplined, by architectural logic.
Lee Bul — ‘From 1998 to Now’
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul
September 4, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Leeum dedicates its galleries to a sweeping retrospective of Lee Bul’s 27-year practice. From cyborg sculptures and mutant hybrids of the late 1990s to immersive mirrored environments of the present, the show underscores her ability to stage rupture as spectacle. The curation unfolds as a play of surfaces—reflective, broken, kaleidoscopic—where history collides with futurity.
Louise Bourgeois — ‘The Evanescent and the Eternal’
Hoam Museum of Art, Seoul
August 30, 2025 – January 4, 2026
The long-awaited Bourgeois retrospective in Korea presents a deeply resonant cross-section of sculpture, drawings, and textile works. Curated around states of fragility and endurance, the exhibition dramatizes her lifelong dialogue with memory, trauma, and architectural form. The galleries oscillate between intimate enclosures and monumental presences, staging a psychological theatre in space.
Kim Tschang-Yeul — ‘A Retrospective’
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
August 22 – December 21, 2025
The Seoul museum gathers Kim’s iconic water-drop paintings alongside rarely seen abstractions, framing them as meditations on time and ephemerality. Repetition becomes its own image: light suspended on canvas, the instant crystallized. The retrospective captures Kim not only as a painter of motifs but as a philosopher of perception.
MMCA Collection — ‘Korean Modern & Contemporary Art’
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon
May 01 - June 27, 2027
The new collection display maps a century of Korean art from modernist beginnings to the contemporary scene. Dansaekhwa anchors the narrative, with Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, and Chung Sang-Hwa placed in dialogue with younger conceptualists. Rather than a static timeline, the show reads as a living archive, revisited and rewritten by each generation.
Hilma af Klint – ‘Proper Summons’
Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery 5 (2F)
July 19 – October 26, 2025
The exhibition brings together over 140 paintings, drawings, videos, and archival materials spanning Hilma af Klint’s spiritual-abstract vision. It is her first major retrospective in Korea, following a run in Tokyo, and it underscores how her work—which she held in private for decades—now speaks broadly to questions of form, mysticism, and perception.
Gala Porras-Kim — ‘The Unseen Record’
Kukje Gallery, Seoul
September 4 – October 26, 2025
The Los Angeles–based korean artist’s first major solo exhibition in Korea stages a conceptual inquiry into how artifacts, languages, and cultural memory are preserved—or misinterpreted—by institutions. Porras-Kim’s drawings, sculptures, and sound pieces probe the boundaries of museological authority, repositioning the act of conservation as a site of creative speculation.
Kim Soo-ja— ‘Breath’
Sunhyewon (SK Foundation Heritage Space), Seoul
September 3 – October 19, 2025
Hosted in the restored Sunhyewon compound, the mirrored floor work transforms the floor plane into a portal, reflecting rafters, rooflines, and the viewer’s feet so that above and below merge. Accompanied by four other works, the exhibition extends Kim’s long meditation on memory, identity, and the body as archive.
Lee Kang-So — ‘Flowing Water, Ongoing Experiment’
Daegu Art Museum, Daegu
September 9, 2025 – February 22, 2026
This sweeping retrospective charts Lee Kang-So’s five-decade engagement with experimental art, traversing painting, sculpture, installation, prints, drawings, and archival works. It pivots around two conceptual axes: 'gok-su-ji-yu' (the tradition of letting a cup drift on flowing water as spontaneous poetic practice) and the ethos of sustained experimentation.