Frieze Seoul has just ended, but the major exhibitions timed to coincide with the fair are still in full swing, across Korea’s chaebol museums, private museums, galleries, and art institutions. As a new art capital in Asia, Seoul is both big and small.
Its largeness lies in the scale of the city and the caliber of its collections: getting from the museums in one district to those in another often means at least a thirty-minute drive, and each district has museums built by different Korean conglomerates, along with national institutions. Arario Museum, 2024; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2024. Its smallness lies in the fact that many private museums and art institutions are not especially large, and are often densely clustered within a single district, within walking distance of one another, forming compact and beautifully proportioned art communities.
We spent several days rushing through Seoul on an art walk, and came away with observations on a distinctly local ecology of art and exhibitions, one shaped largely by chaebols and by the collections of private entrepreneurs. Leeum Museum of Art. Exterior and interior of the Leeum Museum of Art. Mention a famous Korean chaebol and the first name that comes to mind is almost certainly Samsung Group, founded in 1938.
Its businesses span electronics, finance, logistics, construction, chemicals, automobiles, and machinery, among other fields. Samsung is one of Korea’s largest companies, and its total assets rank seventeenth in the world. The Leeum Museum of Art, in Seoul’s Gangnam District, was designed by three internationally renowned architects: Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel, and Rem Koolhaas. Unlike the collections of many old-money groups or foundations, Samsung’s choices of exhibiting artists are strikingly forward-looking and distinctive; compared with the tastes of established European foundations and museums, its sensibility may be closer to Prada’s.
Installation view of Anicka Yi, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” Leeum Museum of Art, 2024. Last year, the museum presented a vast interactive environmental work by Philippe Parreno. During Frieze this time, Leeum is showing a major solo exhibition by the Korean American artist Anicka Yi, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” her first institutional exhibition in Asia.
Entering Yi’s galleries, one first sees, in darkness, a pool over which transparent “lungs,” emitting a ghastly white light and continually extending and retracting their tentacles, hover like some hybrid of diving apparatus and mechanical beetle. Installation view of Anicka Yi, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” Leeum Museum of Art, 2024. On the other side, “The Postnatal Egg,” glowing yellow, contains shifting black shadows that seem at once like insects trapped inside an egg and like some creature trying to break free.
Born in Seoul and now based in New York, Yi is widely regarded as one of the most important and groundbreaking artists working today. This exhibition includes not only a new body of work but also key pieces from the past 15 years. Installation view of Anicka Yi, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” Leeum Museum of Art, 2024. Among them are works made with organic and ephemeral materials, including bacteria, scent, and tempura-fried flowers.
Her upright sculptures resemble organisms overgrown with bacteria, and possess an eerie beauty. In the wall works, she renders the internal structure of bacteria in forms akin to abstraction, calling to mind marine life and the origins of species themselves. Installation view of Anicka Yi, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” Leeum Museum of Art, 2024. The second-floor galleries feel like an enormous petri dish: transparent inflatable laboratory chambers, huge rust-green culture vessels soaking in inky black water, bacteria steadily multiplying.
In her work, living organisms and fungi are enlarged while the human figure becomes small, part of the artist’s effort to challenge entrenched anthropocentric views. Outside the main galleries, Leeum is also presenting two other exhibitions: a collection display of Korean ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and ornaments, and a group show of younger artists, including a set of works by the Chinese artist Zhang Yuewei. Amorepacific Museum of Art. Amorepacific Museum of Art. The museum’s current building, completed in 2018, is also the group’s headquarters. Designed by the British architect David Chipperfield, it comprises 189,000 square meters over 22 floors above ground and 7 below, a bold, spare white structure wrapped in a gridded pattern of square brushed surfaces.
When the museum was founded, in 1979, it was originally intended to house the private collection of Suh Sung-whan, founder of Korea’s most famous cosmetics company, Amorepacific Group. Since becoming a public museum, it has consistently mounted some of the strongest exhibitions in the country. Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset, “Spaces,” Amorepacific Museum of Art, 2024. During Frieze, the museum is presenting “Spaces,” the largest exhibition in Asia to date by the celebrated Nordic duo Elmgreen & Dragset.
The exhibition unfolds like a novel: to enter the galleries is to enter a story the artists have made for us. Built around social networks, interpersonal relations, and social phenomena, the show draws on scenes from life. The artist Elmgreen, Michael, told us that many of its situations are drawn from real experiences in their own lives or those of family and friends. They hope to reconstruct such scenes, presenting typical individuals as specimens of the age.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset, “Spaces,” Amorepacific Museum of Art, 2024. More than sixty works by the duo are distributed across five immersive installations, including a complete 140-square-meter family home, a public swimming pool, a restaurant with a kitchen, a chemistry laboratory, and a reconstruction of an artist’s studio. Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset, “Spaces,” Amorepacific Museum of Art, 2024. Moving through them, one has the sensation of passing between short stories: each scene appears self-contained, yet each is connected to the next.
In one room, the lady of the house appears in a framed photograph; at this moment, she sits in a restaurant video-calling an unidentified man, and before leaving home she has written a line on the mirror: “I will never see you again.” Installation view of Derrick Adams, “The Strip,” Amorepacific Museum of Art, 2024. After the immersive exhibition, visitors can also see “The Strip,” the first solo exhibition in Korea by the Gagosian artist Derrick Adams.
This series of paintings depicts the display windows of beauty-supply stores, creating an especially intriguing juxtaposition with the cosmetics displays upstairs in the museum. According to the artist, the storefronts were photographed and gathered near his studio in Brooklyn and in places around the world. LOTTE Museum of Art. Exterior of Lotte World Tower, the Lotte Group building. Installation view of Daniel Arsham, “Seoul 3024,” LOTTE Museum of Art, 2024. Photograph by Jeon Byung-cheol. The famous Lotte Group, founded in 1948, is one of Korea’s five major conglomerates, with businesses in food, agriculture, dining, hotels, department stores, film, and cosmetics, among other sectors.
Lotte World Tower, the tallest building in Korea and the sixth tallest in the world, is an important urban landmark in Seoul. Our destination there, the LOTTE Museum of Art, was founded in 2018 and occupies the tower’s seventh floor; it was designed by the Seoul firm BCHO Architects. Currently on view is “Seoul 3024,” a solo exhibition by the New York artist Daniel Arsham, known for his “fictional archaeology.”
Installation view of Daniel Arsham, “Seoul 3024,” LOTTE Museum of Art, 2024. Photograph by Jeon Byung-cheol. As the title suggests, Arsham has created for Seoul a large excavation site installed in the museum itself, using sculptures made of volcanic ash, calcite, plaster, amethyst, and other materials to produce the effect of relics unearthed in 3024. The result offers a distinctive experience: a view of the present and the past from the vantage of the future.
Alongside the sculptures are paintings, architectural works, and videos spanning more than 20 years of the artist’s practice, from his “Eroded Classical Sculptures,” based on works in the Louvre collection, to pieces made in collaboration with the iconic two-dimensional franchise Pokemon, among others. Ho-Am Art Museum. Exterior of Ho-Am Art Museum and Bourgeois’s giant spider in the garden. Ho-Am Art Museum is a private museum in Everland, in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, about an hour and a half by car from central Seoul. It opened to the public on April 22, 1982, and was then the largest private museum in Asia. Its grounds include a beautiful traditional Korean garden.
Unlike the Samsung museum described above, which bears a corporate name, Ho-Am, though founded by Samsung Group’s founder, Lee Byung-chul, is named for him in a personal capacity. Why “Ho-Am”? It was in fact Lee Byung-chul’s pen name, meaning to fill space with water as clear as a lake, and to remain as immovable as stone. Installation view of Nicolas Party, “Dust,” Ho-Am Art Museum, Korea, 2024. During Frieze, the Swiss artist Nicolas Party opened “Dust,” his largest retrospective to date, at Ho-Am.
The exhibition presents 48 earlier paintings and sculptures, 20 new works, and five large pastel murals made especially for the occasion. Nicolas Party creating the mural “Clouds” (2024) at Ho-Am Art Museum. Photograph by Woojeong Lee, 2024. The artist arrived early in order to make his signature pastel murals on site, and the result is a rich visual effect created by the layering of mural and traditionally framed painting.
Party has also arranged the first- and second-floor galleries in analogous layouts, using the museum’s narrow corridors, spacious rooms, shared thresholds, faux marble, and other elements that recur in medieval architecture and painting to reconstruct the space and bind each room closely to the next. Installation view of Nicolas Party, “Dust,” Ho-Am Art Museum, Korea, 2024. For Party, art history is an inexhaustible archive, one from which he can freely borrow the styles, subjects, and materials of artists from antiquity to the present. That is why his landscapes, still lifes, and portraits carry a classical inflection within a contemporary frame.
His saturated colors, simplified forms, and uncanny imagery allow the work to move between ease and depth, humor and gravity, seeming at once familiar and elusive. ARARIO Museum. Exterior of ARARIO Museum. ARARIO Museum was founded by one of Korea’s best-known collectors and entrepreneurs, Kim Chang-il. He is also an artist himself; the tree outside the museum and the colored neon sign are both his own works.
ARARIO Museum exhibition space. He began collecting contemporary art in 1978, and brought into his holdings early on some of the major names in contemporary art history: Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Pierre Huyghe, Tracey Emin, Nam June Paik, and others. He speaks with equal familiarity about Chinese artists, too. Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun: though he does not speak Chinese, he knows the names by heart.
ARARIO Museum exhibition space. On view are works from his private collection built over 36 years. The space, like Kim Chang-il himself, is full of enthusiasm and wit; its interior is tangled and irregular, with no obvious viewing route. All one can do is follow chance, staying ready for the next discovery. ARARIO Museum exhibition space. A lounge with bottled water, a bathroom hung with photographs, a half body suddenly appearing before you: to see a show at ARARIO is, indeed, an adventure full of surprise.
SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation. SongEun Art Center. The SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation was established in 1989 by Yoo Sung Yeon, the late founder of the fuel company ST International. Since opening in 2021, this triangular building, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, has attracted intense attention.
If you look closely at the exposed-concrete exterior, you notice the grain of pine impressed on its surface, a fitting echo of the name SongEun. SongEun Art Center. During Frieze, the institution collaborated with Pinault’s foundation on an exhibition of more than 60 works by 20 artists, including Marlene Dumas, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and David Hammons.
Especially arresting is the opera installation by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster on the second basement level. Descending underground, one first hears operatic voices in surround sound, which rise slowly through the museum’s circular void, creating an acoustic effect like that of a small concert hall. Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, OPERA(QM.15), 2016. Then one encounters an “opera stage” made in crimson light; turning around, one finds the singer at the right, lamenting passionately to the audience, and begins to wonder whether one is, in fact, in a theater.
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Exterior of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Installation view of “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists,” National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2024. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, or MMCA, is Korea’s only national museum of contemporary art, and it stands beside the well-known landmark Gyeongbokgung.
The current group exhibition, “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists,” brings together 130 works by 60 women artists from 11 Asian countries, including major figures such as Cao Fei, Guo Fengyi, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Atsuko Tanaka, and Bharti Kher. The exhibition is organized into six sections, using women’s language and women’s perspectives to narrate the world and to reveal the Asian histories inscribed on the body.
Seoul Museum of Art. Installation view of “The Endless Garment at the End of the World,” Seoul Museum of Art, 2024. The Seoul Museum of Art, or SeMA, stands beside Deoksugung, near City Hall Station, in a converted historic building. Its current group exhibition, “The Endless Garment at the End of the World,” likewise gives full force to the work and thought of women artists, and includes works by Korean artists such as Bae Yoon Hwan, Haegue Yang, Hong Seung-Hye, and Lee Bul.
The exhibition asks how, in a post-media era, various “old” and “new” media are to coexist: old media and new media, the virtual and the real, artificial intelligence and the body. When “new” media become “old” under the pressure of history’s forward rush, how is the once-new to situate itself?
Installation view of “The Endless Garment at the End of the World,” Seoul Museum of Art, 2024. Across three days of art walking in Seoul, what we saw were the large and small newly built private museums of Apgujeong, each with its own style yet sharing a certain crispness of line. Itaewon and Hannam-dong, once late-night destinations, have become gathering places for Korea’s new contemporary art spaces. Near Samcheong-dong, public museums and older local galleries are all within walking distance. And in Gangnam, the Leeum Museum of Art casts a cooling veil over the city’s restlessness.
If many people arrive in Seoul still wondering why Frieze chose the city for its only Asian outpost, the answer becomes plain once they are here: the private museums, public museums, and galleries scattered across the city have already become part of its civic ecology. They also make clear that art can render a city more various, more hospitable, and more inventive, giving it a magnetism that invites return.