Since Frieze Seoul launched in 2022, the Korean art system has become markedly more international, while Korean art has assumed a far more prominent position globally. Frieze was less the beginning of that transformation than a catalyst landing strategically in a market with a sophisticated local gallery system and the historic fair Kiaf. Sustained government investment in the creative industries extended the logic of K-cinema and K-pop into the visual arts while a long-established tradition of corporate patronage led by the chaebol, the conglomerate dynasties that powered South Korea’s economic rise. Concurrently, a new generation of younger buyers, flush with the disposable income generated by the pandemic pause, entered the market with considerable appetite for art.
What followed was a short-lived bubble. The buying frenzy that helped fuel Frieze Seoul’s first two editions, alongside an influx of international galleries into the city, had begun to deflate by the fair’s third year. When Frieze held its fourth edition last year, South Korea had just entered a very different economic and political climate. The deeper infrastructure, however, was strong and continues to underpin a Korean art market that is embarking on this year’s Seoul Art Week in a period of recalibration. Political normalization following the June 2025 presidential election, fiscal support, a recovery in domestic consumption and exceptionally strong semiconductor exports have helped stabilize the country’s export-driven economy. The OECD now forecasts 2.6 percent growth in 2026, propelled in particular by the semiconductor cycle.
But if anyone needs further proof that Seoul’s art ecosystem is still very much alive, the city is providing it in abundance. This year, major institutions, long-established galleries and fast-rising younger spaces are mounting an unusually ambitious slate of exhibitions, many devoted to formidable Korean talents. What follows are 13 shows Frieze-goers should absolutely make time for. (Consider, too, a side trip to Gwangju and Busan, as both cities are hosting internationally watched biennials this year.)
Must-see art shows in Seoul
“KOO JEONG A: OUSSSMOS”
Leeum Museum
Through December 27, 2026
This is Koo Jeong A’s largest exhibition to date and the third chapter of her ongoing OUSSS exhibition cycle. The show brings together works spanning three decades of Koo’s practice, with a newly commissioned monumental installation, MOBIOUSSS, alongside immersive works involving phosphorescence, skateparks, scents and magnets. Known for ephemeral environments, sculptures and drawings that examine the poetics of everyday life, Koo engages in an imaginative exercise in worldbuilding, incorporating objects, still and moving images, sound and scent to expose the essence of a reality in continuous transformation. At the core of her practice is an interest in the minute details of our earthly environments and their possible relationship to cosmic phenomena that simultaneously connect and expand them.
Koo’s work is an imaginative exercise in worldbuilding.
Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias
“Do Ho Suh”
MMCA (National Museum Of Contemporary Art of Korea)
Through February 9, 2027
Spanning early works, major pieces and ongoing projects, this large-scale survey of star Korean artist Do Ho Suh marks an important homecoming following his widely acclaimed 2025 survey at Tate Modern. Do Ho Suh’s itinerant life between Seoul, the United States and London has shaped his ongoing investigation into the very notion of home, explored through memory, migration, identity and belonging. He is best known for his life-size architectural replicas in translucent fabric, meticulously recreating corridors, staircases, doors and domestic fixtures. Their weightlessness transforms solid architecture into something ghostlike—a kind of spatial memory suspended between presence and absence, sensory and mental experience, past and present. Across sculpture, drawing, rubbing, video and installation, Suh examines the relationship between the individual body and collective space, and how displacement alters our understanding of where and what “home” is.
Do Ho SuhPart of work / Do Ho Suh, ‹Nest/s›, 2024. Polyester, stainless steel, 410.1 x 375.4 x 2148.7 cm.
Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro, Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. © Do Ho Suh
“Muyeong Kim: Pig”
Art Sonje
Through October 4, 2026
Following Adrián Villar Rojas’s memorable site-specific exhibition last year, Art Sonje is presenting new photographs and sculptures by Muyeong Kim alongside a site-specific intervention that exposes the theatrical space itself as an “apparatus”—a mechanical device for constructing worlds and producing meaning. The first museum exhibition for the 30-something artist, it will feature new photographs made on Sorok Island, as well as a black-and-white photographic series taken at Seodaemun Prison History Hall. In a distinctly Foucauldian vein, the works further expose the social apparatuses and dynamics of power embodied by such institutions while reflecting on their histories as sites shaped by the Japanese Empire during the colonial period. The exhibition title, “Pig,” refers to the pig iron counterweights used backstage to support stage machinery. Throughout his practice, Kim has focused on revealing the complex interplay of historical, material and symbolic conditions through which social apparatuses govern lives.
Art Sonje’s Art Hall is on the museum’s B1 level.
Courtesy: the artist x Frieze
“Sol Lewitt: Open Structure”
Amorepacific Museum of Art
Through February 28, 2027
The Amorepacific Museum of Art, housed within the headquarters of the family-run South Korean cosmetics conglomerate, is staging a major exhibition focused on the revolutionary conceptual and minimalist practice of Sol LeWitt. Organized by the museum in cooperation with the artist’s estate and in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the show expands on a curatorial framework originally conceived in that city. As LeWitt’s first major solo exhibition in South Korea, the show offers a broad overview of his practice, encompassing wall drawings, structures, works on paper and artists’ books.
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #770. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2025.
Photo: Kazuo Fukunaga. © 2026 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.
“WOODS LANDS MEADOWS”
Frieze House
Through Sept 19, 2026
As Sol LeWitt gains renewed momentum in Korea this season, legendary dealer Paula Cooper—who has long represented his work—chose an opportune moment to establish a temporary foothold in the capital. Taking over Frieze House Seoul, the Korean counterpart to 9 Cork Street that Frieze launched last year to give galleries a year-round platform for temporary exhibitions, Cooper is presenting “WOODS LANDS MEADOWS,” a group show exploring contemporary approaches to landscape and the ways natural and built environments are reencountered through image, language and material. Taking its title from Carl Andre’s 1972 poem, the exhibition brings together works by some of the gallery’s most significant artists, including Terry Adkins, Carl Andre, Tauba Auerbach, Jennifer Bartlett, Jane Benson, Cecily Brown, Sarah Charlesworth, Mark di Suvero, Hans Haacke, Cynthia Hawkins, Sol LeWitt, Walid Raad, Veronica Ryan and Meg Webster.
Hans Haacke, Sky Line, 1967. Color photograph mounted on aluminum panel, 60 x 39 1/4 in. (152.4 x 99.7 cm)
© Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Kaws, “Friends and Neighbors”
Space K
Through December 17, 2026
KAWS’s sprawling exhibition “Friends and Neighbors” has landed at Seoul’s Space K—the artist’s first institutional exhibition in Korea. Bringing together 20 new works, including large-scale paintings and sculptures featuring his signature characters, the show looks beyond KAWS’s instantly recognizable imagery to probe the complexity of contemporary relationships, moving between intimacy and discomfort, connection and disconnection, while offering a more anthropological observation of a society increasingly shaped by mediated experience. Beginning with graffiti and advertising interventions on the streets of New Jersey and New York in the early-to-mid 1990s, KAWS has built a singular visual language that collapses the boundaries between fine art and popular culture, the street and the museum, image and merchandise, while reflecting the media-driven symbols and mythologies of our time.
Installation view, KAWS, “FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS” in Space K, Seoul, 2026.
Photo: JunHo Lee, courtesy of Space K
“Park Seo-Bo & Huong Dodinh: Emptiness, Fullness”
Park Seo Bo Museum
Through January 3, 2027
The Park Seo-Bo Museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Park Seo-Bo & Huong Dodinh: Emptiness, Fullness,” pairs the artist’s work with that of Vietnamese-French abstract painter Huong Dodinh, staging a dialogue that explores the expansive possibilities of painting across different cultural backgrounds and generations. Moving to Paris in 1953 after the outbreak of the First Indochina War, Dodinh encountered the European avant-gardes but remained largely independent of the dominant trends of the period, developing a highly personal language of abstraction—much as Park Seo-Bo forged his own path despite his periods abroad. Both engage deeply with the physical, almost elemental qualities of pigment and surface, finding within the canvas a sense of transcendence. Through absorption, reflection and meditative reduction in Dodinh’s work and through Park Seo-Bo’s repeated painterly gestures, lines and layered surfaces, they arrive at ethereal minimalist fields that seem to move beyond the materiality of painting itself, connecting the fleeting rhythms of human experience to something more expansive.
The Park Seo-Bo Museum.
Photo: Sun Namgoong © PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION
Genesis Kai,
“The Crimson Hour”
“The Crimson Hour”
ACEL ART COMPANY
Through October 2, 2026
In terms of digital practices born out of new technologies, Genesis Kai is one of the most interesting emerging artists in the region. Not a real person, Genesis is a chiral twin and A.I.-infused alter ego created by Ming Shiu, a new media artist who explores memory and identity while reconnecting with culture and heritage through a transhumanist lens. Approaching contemporary technologies through East Asian cultural and philosophical traditions, her work occupies an intriguing space between the physical and the virtual, opening up new ways of thinking about memory, desire and cultural transmission. As a virtual artist with no flesh-and-blood existence, Genesis generates new meta-mythologies that unfold fluidly across both physical and digital media, shaping a new kind of cultural imagination. The work attempts to confront some of the defining questions of our time while looking back to ancestral knowledge for ways of navigating rupture and disruption.
Genesis Kai is the creation of new media artist Ming Shiu.
Courtesy the artist
Kim Taek Sang, “As It Is”
Johyun Gallery Seoul, Johyun Gallery, Dalmaji, and Johyun Gallery Haeundae
Through November 8, 2026
Fast-rising and increasingly sought-after Korean artist Kim Taek Sang has, for more than three decades, explored the diffusion, sedimentation and layering of color through the medium of water. Delicate accumulations of pigment on canvas create subtle hues and chromatic shifts that scatter light and give the surface a remarkable sense of depth and density, evoking water caught between states, at times like ice or glass in its reflective qualities, at others like a pond in the way it captures and holds light through vibration and oscillation. Kim describes these works as dàamhwa (淡畵—dàam painting), where dàam carries meanings of clear, delicate, faint or thin in tint. The exhibition features works from Kim’s signature series—Breathing, Flows and Resonance—which embody the temporality of spring, summer and autumn, respectively. Ice Blossom, a new body of work that extends his artistic language into winter, will be unveiled.
Kim Taek Sang, Ice blossom 26-57, 2026. Water acrylic on canvas, 208 x 205 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Johyun Gallery
Park Seo Bo, “Changing Unchanging”
Through October 18, 2026
For Seoul Art Week, Kukje is celebrating the late Dansaekhwa master Park Seo-Bo with an extensive exhibition spread across two of its spaces. “Changing Unchanging” examines Park’s lifelong, repetition-based painting process and the conceptual framework of his abstraction, moving between personal rumination and more philosophical meditations on the nature and materiality of reality. Centered on one of the most important ideas in his artistic universe—the philosophy of change—the exhibition considers what change means and how it became a driving force in his continual rethinking of the very nature of art. Kukje also anchors the dense concentration of blue-chip galleries in Samcheong, which gets its own spotlight on Thursday during Samcheong Night, when the gallery hosts its customary celebration with street food and drinks.
The show examines Park’s lifelong, repetition-based painting process and the conceptual framework of his abstraction.
Courtesy the gallery
“TORQUE”
Through September 27, 2026
In just five years of operation, CYLINDER has established itself as the place to discover the most interesting South Korean artists. This year, the gallery is devoting prime space during Seoul Art Week to young talent selected through its annual program “TORQUE,” which finds the best names from degree shows at domestic art universities and presents their work. Each edition has a subtitle drawn from automotive terminology, from “TORQUE 1 / GEAR SHIFT” to “TORQUE 6 / RESTOMOD,” CYLINDER has featured 18 young, promising artists. True to its name, TORQUE supplies momentum, helping artists launch their careers with real force. Artists previously presented in the program will be featured by CYLINDER at this year’s edition of Frieze Seoul, including Jonghwan Lee, Rim Park, Sunwon Chang, Seo Hyun Kim, Minseo Kang, Dobin Kim and Kyungwon Yoon. “The gear-shaped booth embodies the essence of TORQUE, existing within it in the most CYLINDER-like way. Having started from Bongcheon-dong and run together for five years, we mark our first milestone here and continue accelerating toward the next horizon,” founder Dooyong Ro told Observer. “CYLINDER is TORQUE, and TORQUE is CYLINDER.”
Each edition of “TORQUE” carries a subtitle drawn from automotive terminology.
Courtesy the artist and Cylider
Yulia Iosilzon, “Zero Gravity”
Through October 3, 2026
Among the most interesting young galleries in the city, FOUNDRY has established itself on the international circuit with a program that balances championing experimental local talent with presenting rising international names. For Seoul Art Week, the gallery is presenting a solo exhibition of London-based artist Yulia Iosilzon, after her work was introduced to Korean audiences last year in a well-received solo booth by Carvalho at Frieze. Inspired by botanical life and natural rhythms, Iosilzon creates painterly ecosystems that envision the harmonious integration of different species, sky, earth and water. Comprising translucent paintings, ceramic mosaics and newly introduced fabric sculptures, the exhibition transforms the gallery space into a living, ever-evolving “active system,” where she stages a narrative of relentless “metamorphosis” that invites viewers to embrace a fluid, creative and generative interdependence between beings.
Yulia Iosilzon, The Places in Between, 2026.
Courtesy of the artist and FOUNDRY SEOUL, Seoul. Photo: Deniz Güzel
Choi Yoonhee, “Presences Adrift”
Through October 4, 2026
Waves and water are some of the best metaphors for time and space, translating as they do the fluidity of matter. They also evoke the movement of thoughts and memories and our relationship to space and time itself. With works ranging from watercolor drawings to large-scale paintings, Choi Yoonhee’s exhibition presents the artist’s recent investigations into perception, the body and space through wave-like forms that animate the surfaces of each work, blurring boundaries between the geological and the marine and between inner and outer space.
Yoonhee’s exhibition explores the artist’s recent investigations into perception, the body and space through wave-like movements.
Courtesy G Gallery and the artist
