The fifth edition of Frieze Seoul has just drawn to a close at COEX, but this year’s most exciting moments may not have been confined to the fair itself.
The standout is the first museum retrospective since Georg Baselitz died in April. At the Sehwa Museum of Art, the exhibition looks back across six decades from the “gold paintings” of his final years. MMCA Seoul revisits the practice of nationally celebrated artist Do Ho Suh through nearly 500 works, while Koo Jeong A transforms Leeum Museum of Art into a universe of phosphorescence, magnetism, scent, and hidden objects.
Sol LeWitt’s conceptual art receives its first large-scale presentation in Korea, and the recently opened FUTURA SEOUL hosts Es Devlin’s first solo exhibition in the country. Outside central Seoul, at Tadao Ando’s Museum SAN in Wonju, Lee Bae’s three-decade exploration of charcoal unfolds across the museum. These six exhibitions may appear unrelated, yet all ask a similar question: where does an artwork begin—with an object, or with the relationships among body, space, memory, and viewer?
SECTION 01 | Georg Baselitz: The Inverted World
In 1969, Georg Baselitz—a central figure in postwar German art and Neo-Expressionism—began turning the figures, trees, and landscapes in his paintings upside down. The gesture became his best-known artistic language. Once a figure no longer stands in its expected orientation, the first thing we see is no longer who it is, but color, brushwork, weight, and pictorial structure.
The exhibition at Seoul’s Sehwa Museum of Art brings together 46 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures spanning more than six decades. It is Baselitz’s first museum solo exhibition in Korea in over twenty years and the first museum retrospective anywhere since his death in April 2026.
The exhibition begins with visceral figurative works from the 1960s, then moves through inverted images, portraits of his wife Elke, the Remix series, eagles, and fragmented bodies before arriving at the “gold paintings” of his final years.
Born in Saxony in 1938, Baselitz grew up amid the ruins of war and came of age during Germany’s division. He could accept neither East German Socialist Realism nor a complete absorption into the Western system of abstraction. His broken, distorted, inverted figures therefore continued to carry the instability of postwar Germany’s identity.
In the twenty-first century he began revisiting his early works. The Remix series is the clearest example, bringing the older artist face to face with his younger self. The same figures, poses, and compositions return, but the execution is faster and the pictures more open.
In the late gold paintings, the figures grow thinner still. Bodies hover like ghosts against black grounds, while traces of wheelchairs, trolleys, and walkers enter the image. Rather than hiding the conditions of an aging body, the paintings turn restricted movement into a new working method.
In his final interview, Baselitz said that black marked the beginning of an aesthetic intention, while gold marked its end. Here gold evokes both religious imagery and eternity, yet also resembles a light that has already begun to fade.
He described the 2026 work More Than That as the distillation of everything he had done before. There is no heroic finale in the picture—only bodies, lines, and gold continuing to drift through darkness. After more than half a century of inversion, perhaps what has truly been turned upside down is not the painted figure, but our habitual way of looking.
Baselitz once said that he tried to enter a certain art-world circle but never succeeded. He had assumed others would follow him in inverting images, yet no one truly did. That isolation lends this exhibition its unusual completeness: from a young rebel in postwar Germany to an artist confronting age and death, inversion becomes more than a formal device—it is his way of refusing to submit to an established order.
SECTION 02 | Do Ho Suh: An Unreachable House
Entering the galleries of MMCA Seoul, the first thing we encounter is not a solid house but a translucent architectural passage that visitors can walk through.
Measuring roughly 21.5 meters, Nest/s is made from polyester fabric and stainless steel. Doorframes, corridors, and transitional spaces from the artist’s homes in London, New York, Berlin, Seoul, and elsewhere are joined into a chain of architectural memories without a fixed beginning or end. To enter the work is also to enter the artist’s life of migration: a house is no longer merely an address, but a layer of “skin” the body can carry.
One of Do Ho Suh’s largest exhibitions in Korea to date, it presents nearly 500 works across installation, sculpture, video, works on paper, and around 200 paintings. Curator Won Ji-seol argues that it should not simply be called a retrospective, but a “progress report” on the artist’s practice so far. Early paintings, architectural installations, and recent moving-image works are therefore interwoven rather than arranged mechanically by date or medium.
Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home is shown in its entirety in Korea for the first time. Suh covered a former home with paper, then repeatedly rubbed its walls, doorknobs, outlets, and architectural details with colored pencil. The act resembles both archaeology and a tactile farewell: when the physical space cannot be carried away, the body still attempts to preserve the traces of its surface.
In the English title, “rubbing” and “loving” differ by only a few letters; in the work they become almost the same action. By touching every inch of the house, the artist records its architecture while affirming the relationship he once had with the space.
Suh has long described memory as the core of his practice. His translucent fabric does not reproduce a real house; it gives form to memory’s fragility, ambiguity, and mobility. Architecture sheds the weight of concrete and becomes something that can be folded like clothing and packed into a suitcase.
This helps explain why “home” is never a warm or certain answer in Suh’s work. In Perfect Home, he overlays different places in which he has lived. Bridge Project imagines a house between Seoul, New York, and London, but its calculated midpoint falls in the open sea. The perfect home may be precisely a blank space that can never actually be built.
“When a traditional Korean house is moved into a Western museum, it is seen as unfamiliar and foreign. Yet when the same work returns to Korea, it can appear strange again because it is enclosed by the museum system,” the artist has observed. For Suh, home is not a circular return to the point of origin, but a continual recognition that the point of origin has changed.
The exhibition does not remain within personal nostalgia. Who Am We? is composed of countless tiny portraits that resemble abstract fields of color from a distance but resolve into faces up close. In Floor, visitors stand on a transparent surface supported by a dense mass of miniature figures. Individual, family, urban, and collective identities remain inseparably entangled.
Suh participated in the opening program of MMCA Seoul in 2013. Returning thirteen years later, he brings not one signature architectural work but a vast memory system composed of hundreds of pieces. From the basement galleries to the studio spaces upstairs, visitors must keep turning, passing through, and looking back. The museum’s circulation becomes part of the work: “home” is no longer placed before us, but can only be reached temporarily through walking.
SECTION 03 | Koo Jeong A: When the Lights Go Out, the Work Appears
Koo Jeong A’s exhibition at Leeum Museum of Art begins with things that are almost impossible to notice.
A sugar cube, a piece of pencil lead, an aspirin tablet, a mothball, or a scent that cannot immediately be identified: she places objects in overlooked corners, suspending the work between appearance and disappearance. Within the museum’s vast spaces, these small, secretive gestures collide with the scale of the architecture.
One of the most internationally influential Korean contemporary artists—and among the earliest to enter mainstream European and American contemporary-art circuits—Koo has been known since the 1990s for large immersive installations and site-specific works. Her media span architecture, sculpture, painting, moving image, sound, scent, phosphorescent material, and even skateparks. Her work explores the relationship between people and space, perception and memory, reality and imagination, while drawing on Taoism, qi, and natural elements.
The title OUSSSMOS combines “OUSSS,” a word the artist coined in the 1990s, with “COSMOS.” It is neither a real place nor a complete worldview, but something closer to a cosmic system in which different materials, memories, and forces can briefly meet.
Presenting 35 works, it is Koo’s largest museum solo exhibition in Korea. The show occupies not only the Jean Nouvel-designed M2 building but also extends into the lobby, stairs, gaps in walls, and even spaces devoted to ancient art.
Visitors first encounter enormous phosphorescent structures. Only when the lights go out does the material slowly release the light it has absorbed, allowing the architecture to emerge in darkness—one of Koo’s most recognizable approaches. The new work MOBIOUSSS, about eight meters wide and nearly six tons, combines a Möbius strip with a skatepark. It resembles both a spacecraft that has fallen into the museum and an endlessly looping road with no inside or outside.
Conventional sculpture usually asks viewers to keep their distance, while a skatepark only becomes complete when bodies enter, move, and even fall. The work is both sculpture and public facility: it sets a route for the body while returning its ultimate rhythm to its users.
Yet Koo does not want the work to rely on scale alone to create spectacle. “I am not trying to produce tension or shock,” she says. Her real concern is how to restore the viewer’s sense of discovery—something may have been there all along, even if we never noticed it.
This mode of attention runs through the exhibition. Nine magnetic sculptures pull objects toward one another through invisible forces. Fifty crystals are hidden inside gabion walls; the work does not demand that visitors find them all, but accepts omission as part of looking. The large painting project R comprises 1,001 drawings and 77 wooden boxes, yet the museum never displays every image at once. The complete work is present while refusing to be seen in a single viewing.
The approach can be traced to Odorama Cities, presented at the Korean Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale. From more than 600 scent memories of Korea, the artist extracted and produced seventeen fragrances. Scent cannot be mapped with clear borders, but it can suddenly awaken memories of a city, a room, or a period of one’s life.
OUSSSMOS expands place, identity, and memory to a cosmic scale. If Odorama Cities searched for Korea through scent, the Leeum exhibition asks a broader question: what makes a place—architecture, objects, bodies, or the invisible yet real presence of magnetic fields, smells, and time?
SECTION 04 | Sol LeWitt: The Work Can Be Erased, but the Idea Remains
Sol LeWitt was one of the most important founders of American Minimalism and Conceptual art in the twentieth century. From the 1960s onward, he became known for radically simple geometric structures, modular cubes, and his signature Wall Drawings. His central proposition was that the most important part of an artwork is not the object made by the artist’s hand, but the idea and the rules themselves.
At the Amorepacific Museum of Art, the wall drawings are not original objects left behind by the artist. Twenty-three students from Korean universities joined APMA Makers and, under the guidance of representatives of the LeWitt estate, translated the artist’s written instructions into line and color.
LeWitt established written directions, numbers, proportions, and color rules for others to execute on site. When the exhibition ends, the image will be painted over or erased, but the instructions can be realized again in another museum by another group of people. His rules do not eliminate individual difference; they function more like a musical score. The composer supplies the structure, while performers, instruments, and venue make each realization slightly different. The work’s identity no longer belongs to an irreplaceable object, but exists among idea, execution, and result.
LeWitt’s first major solo exhibition in Korea brings together 45 works, including thirteen wall drawings as well as structures, photographs, prints, works on paper, and archival material. It stretches from the black-and-white geometric systems of the 1960s to late works filled with curves, waves, and saturated color.
Incomplete Open Cube 6/20 repeatedly subtracts edges from a complete cube, revealing how many results one rule can produce. Serial Project #1 (ABCD) combines cubes and open structures according to a repeated ordering system. By Wall Drawing #784 and Wall Drawing #882B, the restrained geometry of the early work has developed into vast, bright, rhythmic fields of color.
Wall Drawing #1164 is especially suited to the museum’s continuous, open underground space. Its lines are not images hung on a wall; they directly alter the wall itself. As visitors move from gallery to gallery, painting shifts from a frontal plane into an architectural experience that surrounds the body.
LeWitt also had a rarely discussed connection to East Asia. During his military service in the Korean War, he moved through California, Japan, and Korea. Decades later his work returns to Korea without a monumental historical narrative, asking in the simplest possible terms: if an artwork can be repeatedly completed by different people, where does the artist’s authorship reside?
SECTION 05 | Es Devlin: An Exhibition as a Temporary Society
Es Devlin is one of the most influential stage designers and interdisciplinary artists working today. She combines theater, architecture, sculpture, light, moving image, and collective performance to examine how looking, language, ecology, and groups meet in space. Her best-known works include Mirror Maze, Memory Palace, Forest of Us, and Come Home Again.
She has designed stages for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, U2, Adele, and other global performers, and has worked on the Olympic Games, opera, and large public-art projects. She never treats the stage as decorative background. Instead, every gathered audience becomes a “temporary society”: strangers form a provisional connection by entering the same space and looking toward the same light.
This is Devlin’s first solo exhibition in Korea and the third project in FUTURA SEOUL’s Poem series. It brings together Library of Infinite Stories, Mirror Maze, Screen Share, A Line of Light, Come Home Again, and other works, including new versions adapted to FUTURA SEOUL’s galleries.
Come Home Again was first created for Tate Modern in London in 2022. Based on a cross-section of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, Devlin built a temporary structure and spent four months drawing 243 species under pressure in London. At sunset each day, a choir sang the names of those plants and animals, granting forms of life often overlooked in the city a brief right to be remembered at dusk.
In Seoul, the work expands into a new version featuring 250 species that live in London and Seoul, with their names spoken in eight languages. We learn that around 6,000 species live in Seoul, and humans are only one among them.
What makes the work moving is that viewers must look up to identify the outline of a bird, plant, or insect. After sunset, light, sound, and natural dusk transform the piece together. Devlin says that sunset is one of the exhibition’s most important—and least controllable—events.
She describes her practice as a sustained challenge to the idea that we are separate from one another. Mirrors, light, and projection recur not merely to create spectacle, but to break down boundaries between stage and audience, individual and collective, humans and other species.
SECTION 06 | Lee Bae: Seven Tons of Charcoal, Letting the City Grow Again
At the entrance to Museum SAN, Lee Bae has built the eight-meter-tall Issu du feu from roughly seven tons of charred wood—a massive black column that appears to support the building’s eaves. Up close, the fissures left by fire remain clearly visible, resembling both the ruins of a blaze and time compressed into solid form.
Museum SAN is surrounded by mountains, water, stone walls, and light. The walk from its entrance to the galleries shifts us from urban time into natural time. Here Lee’s charcoal is no longer a black object placed before a white wall; it enters into relation with distant forest, stone, and sunlight.
This is the first time since opening that Museum SAN—Tadao Ando’s building often called Korea’s most beautiful museum—has given its entire space to a major solo exhibition by a Korean artist. Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and moving image, the exhibition traces more than three decades of Lee’s work with charcoal.
Born in Cheongdo, Korea, in 1956, Lee has lived in Paris since 1990. Working with charcoal, carbon black, and ink, he brings traces of fire, calligraphic gesture, and East Asian ideas of cycles, time, and regeneration into contemporary abstraction.
Lee began using charcoal after moving to Paris, initially because money was limited. Charcoal was inexpensive and could be shipped from Korea to France; more importantly, it connected to East Asia’s millennia-old culture of ink. Through burning, wood loses its original form but gains a more stable, profound black. In Lee’s work, charcoal becomes a cultural language linking fire, life, death, and rebirth.
The monumental scale of Issu du feu also responds to the forest fires that have become increasingly frequent in recent years, including those in Korea’s Gangwon Province, Spain, and Canada. In the face of disaster, “waiting” is not passive stillness; it means accepting that some changes cannot be fully controlled while leaving time for recovery and regrowth.
The exhibition title, En attendant—“While Waiting”—is closely tied to the artist’s background. Raised in a farming family, Lee compares his method to a farmer’s relationship with the land: sowing, waiting, and accepting the uncertainty of weather and time. Art is not the rapid production of a conclusion, but a long process of repeated labor through which material reveals itself.
The idea appears most directly in Becoming. A brushstroke about nine meters long is projected onto soil from the artist’s hometown of Cheongdo, where plants continue to grow throughout the exhibition.
Charcoal comes from trees but can only be formed through fire; plants grow from the earth and eventually return to it. The work and the natural environment surrounding the museum form a complete cycle.
If an art fair shows how art is selected, traded, and collected, these six exhibitions are more concerned with how art enters into relation with our bodies, memories, and lived world.
Baselitz’s six decades of inversion teach us to look again. Do Ho Suh turns houses into foldable memories. Koo Jeong A builds a new universe from scent, magnetic fields, and objects that glow in darkness. Sol LeWitt shows that a work can be erased yet continually reborn through an idea. Es Devlin assembles viewers into a temporary community, while Lee Bae waits for plants to grow again from the charcoal left after fire.
Frieze Seoul lasts only four days, but what is truly worth seeing in the city extends far beyond those four days. Perhaps that is the real meaning of an art week: to rediscover, within a city, different speeds of looking.