Kiaf SEOUL and Frieze Seoul both open on September 2 this year. From August 31 to September 6, Seoul Art Week 2026 will unfold across the city. With 135 visual arts institutions and venues taking part—including museums, galleries, art fairs, alternative spaces, and emerging art spaces—Seoul will be transformed into a citywide art scene for an entire week.
 
Yet the art fairs alone are not enough to experience Seoul Art Week in full. While Kiaf and Frieze offer a concentrated view of the global art market, Seoul’s museums and exhibition spaces provide a deeper understanding of the historical foundations of Korean art, the changes it has undergone, and the directions it is taking today.
 
This year, in particular, visitors can encounter the many histories and languages of Korean art at once: from the emergence of Korean abstraction and the development of Dansaekhwa to the contemporary expansion of Korean painting, as well as practices exploring migration and identity, social systems, immaterial sensations, and the digital environment.
 
These exhibitions do not propose a single, shared idea of “Koreanness.” Rather, Korean art today has been shaped by artists from different generations, each of whom has developed a distinct artistic language in response to the conditions and experiences of their own time.
 
We have selected seven exhibitions that international art professionals, collectors, and art enthusiasts visiting Korea for Seoul Art Week should not miss.

Do Ho Suh — Home, Movement, and Spaces of Memory
 
Among the exhibitions deserving particular attention during this year’s Seoul Art Week is Do Ho Suh’s major solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in Seoul.
 
Taking “home” as his point of departure, Suh has long explored migration and habitation, the individual and the collective, and memory and identity. By reconstructing architectural spaces in which he has lived using translucent fabric, or connecting places he has experienced in different cities, he transforms the home from a physical structure into a place carried in the body and memory.
 
In Suh’s work, doors and corridors, stairs and walls, and floors are more than architectural elements. They function as structures of memory, revealing the time and experience accumulated as an individual passes through a particular place. His lightweight, portable fabric houses are both meticulous records and precarious structures that can be folded and carried elsewhere at any moment.
 
The exhibition surveys Suh’s practice from his early work to major pieces and ongoing projects. It includes the large-scale installation Nest/s (2024), allowing visitors to trace the development of his decades-long meditation on space and movement.
 
Born in Seoul and active across the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world, Suh has made movement both a condition and a subject of his practice. Although he is already well known internationally, encountering his work again in Seoul carries particular resonance.
 
The exhibition reveals how an artist who began in Korea and moved through the world transformed the personal question “Where is home?” into a universal contemporary concern.
 
 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition: 《Do Ho Suh》
Dates: August 27, 2026–February 9, 2027
Venue: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul
Address: 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul
Closed: Mondays and January 1
Admission and reservations: Check whether advance booking is required before visiting
Website: MMCA, 《Do Ho Suh》
 
 
 

Koo Jeong A: 《OUSSSMOS》 — Sensing the Invisible
 
On September 5, toward the end of Seoul Art Week, Leeum Museum of Art will open Koo Jeong A’s solo exhibition 《OUSSSMOS》. Those wishing to see the exhibition during Seoul Art Week will need to schedule their visit for September 5 or 6.
 
Koo, who represented Korea at the 60th Venice Biennale, has spent more than three decades exploring the relationship between space and forces that are not readily visible. Her practice encompasses scent, light, magnetism, phosphorescent materials, sound, architectural interventions, and skateparks.
 
Koo’s work moves beyond the conventional experience of viewing a sculpture or installation as an autonomous object. Elusive elements—the scent and light of a space, its temperature and atmosphere, and the movement of visitors—interact to form a sensory environment.
This is the largest museum solo exhibition of Koo’s work ever held in Korea. It brings together central elements that have run through her practice, including phosphorescence, skateparks, magnets, and scent.
 
《OUSSSMOS》 is the third chapter in an exhibition project following 《Land of OUSSS [KANGSE]》 at LUMA Arles in France in 2025 and 《Land of OUSSS [GRAVITTA]》 at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in 2026. It expands the multiple layers of “OUSSS” explored in the earlier exhibitions into a single cosmic environment.
 
The exhibition is not confined to the M2 gallery. Works permeate the museum, appearing in the lobby, in concealed spaces between walls, and within the M1 permanent exhibition of Korean traditional art. In doing so, they blur the boundaries between contemporary and traditional art, and between galleries and communal areas. Rather than following a prescribed sequence, visitors encounter works unexpectedly as they move through the museum.
 
Rather than offering fixed meanings, Koo’s work invites visitors to discover subtle changes and unfamiliar sensations for themselves. As important as the visible works are the atmosphere and energy surrounding them, and the sensations that arise between the visitor’s body and the space.
 
If Do Ho Suh asks what space means to a person in motion, Koo Jeong A asks how deeply we are capable of sensing that space.
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: 《Koo Jeong A: OUSSSMOS》
Dates: September 5–December 27, 2026
Venue: Primarily M2 at Leeum Museum of Art, extending into the lobby and the M1 permanent exhibition of Korean traditional art
Address: 60-16 Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul
Closed: Mondays and January 1
Admission: Advance online reservation recommended
Website: Leeum Museum of Art, 《Koo Jeong A: OUSSSMOS》
 

Yang Ah Ham: 《Undefined Panorama》 — Ways of Seeing the World
 
Art Sonje Center is currently presenting Yang Ah Ham’s solo exhibition 《Undefined Panorama》.
 
Since the mid-1990s, Ham has investigated the relationship between social structures and the individual through moving image, installation, and long-term research-based projects. Spanning all three floors of Art Sonje Center, this exhibition brings together new works, key pieces, and archival materials from the artist’s ongoing ‘Undefined Panorama’ project, which began in 2018.
 
The project’s central concerns took shape in response to a tragic event that shook Korean society in 2014. Confronted with the suffering experienced by individuals and communities when social systems fail, Ham asked what she could do as an artist. This question led her to develop the ‘Undefined Panorama’ project in earnest from 2018 onward.
 
At the center of the exhibition is the new work Undefined Panorama 4.0 (2026). The eight-channel video is installed inside a large circular structure, enveloping the viewer. Against the backdrop of society’s transition from industrial capitalism to financial and data capitalism, the work considers how the individual body and everyday life—and the relationships between human beings, society, and nature—have changed.
 
The viewer does not stand outside the panorama as an observer looking down upon it, but enters the circular structure and becomes part of a network connecting events and people. The conventional panoramic viewpoint, which claims to command the world in a single glance, is rendered impossible.
 
Another new work, Listening Speaker, Speaking Other (2026), gathers private monologues from individuals living in different parts of the world. Their disparate languages and experiences are not consolidated into a single conclusion or grand narrative. Rather than interpreting or speaking on behalf of others, the work asks whether a relationship might begin with the act of listening.
 
The exhibition also includes major works connected to the project: Sleep (2015–2016), which addresses social systems and individual anxiety during disasters; Undefined Panorama 2.0 (2019), which traces the structures and inequalities of financial capitalism; and Hunger 2.0 (2023), which examines structurally produced hunger.
 
Here, “panorama” does not mean a complete vista from which the entire world can be surveyed at once. Instead, it becomes a concept through which Ham questions whether a complex and interconnected world can ever be understood from a single perspective.
 
Today, we encounter more information and images than ever before, yet they are constantly selected and edited by algorithms, media, and political and economic systems. Is the world we see the whole, or merely one image constructed by someone else?
 
The exhibition demonstrates that Korean contemporary art engages the international art world not only through recognizably Korean images or materials, but also through sustained investigations into universal questions: the relationship between social systems and individuals, and between human and nonhuman beings.
 
 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition: 《Yang Ah Ham: Undefined Panorama》
Dates: July 31–October 4, 2026
Venue: Art Sonje Center
Address: 87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 12:00–7:00 p.m.
Closed: Mondays
Website: Art Sonje Center, 《Yang Ah Ham: Undefined Panorama》
 

Kim Heecheon: 《Moles》 — New Sensibilities in a Digital Reality
 
Kim Heecheon’s 《Moles》 at Seo-Seoul Museum of Art offers one of the most compelling explorations of how digital technology is reshaping perception and identity in Korean contemporary art.
 
Kim has explored how technological environments—including smartphones, GPS, game engines, digital images, and virtual spaces—transform human perception and identity. In his work, reality and the virtual do not stand in opposition. In a world where smartphones, games, online platforms, and artificial intelligence are already embedded in everyday life, physical and digital realities are deeply intertwined.
 
We use screens to find our way, form relationships, store memories, and see ourselves. Digital technology, in this context, is no longer merely a tool that supplements reality. It changes the very ways in which we experience time, perceive the world, and construct the self. Through the languages of moving image, games, photography, and installation, Kim captures the new sensibilities produced by this transformation.
 
The exhibition centers on recent and new works created since 2023. These include the self-playing games Cutter3 (2023) and Double Poser (2023), made with the Unity game engine, as well as the new works Lemon (2026) and the four-channel video Cured (2026).
Made with generative artificial intelligence, Cured is a multichannel video that considers how the image ecology of the near future might transform the world and human perception. In an environment where technology recedes from view and the distance between human beings and systems collapses, it asks how much of the world we see and experience can truly be called our own.
 
The newly unveiled photographic work .dng (2026) consists of approximately 100 images selected from 5,841 photographs taken by the artist on his mobile phone. Rather than following a fixed subject or complete narrative, the work records the passage of time and incidental, discontinuous experiences, revealing another way in which digital images accumulate memory and everyday life.
 
The “moles” of the exhibition title are beings that travel underground between different game worlds. They symbolize a desire to escape environments constructed by technology, while also suggesting a new kind of subject: one that is not fixed within a single world or identity, but passes between multiple realities.
 
The exhibition venue itself is also noteworthy. Seo-Seoul Museum of Art is the first public art museum in southwestern Seoul and the city’s first public museum dedicated to new media. Its programs focus on contemporary art that experiments with new technologies, media, and visual languages.
 
Although the museum lies some distance from Seoul’s established art districts such as Samcheong-dong and Hannam-dong, the exhibition offers an important perspective on how a new generation of Korean artists understands the relationship between technology and reality, images and identity.
 
 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition: Seo-Seoul Museum of Art Solo Exhibition of Media Artist, 《Kim Heecheon: Moles》
Dates: August 20–November 8, 2026
Venue: Galleries 1 and 2 and Multipurpose Hall, B1, Seo-Seoul Museum of Art
Address: 65 Siheung-daero 79-gil, Geumcheon-gu, Seoul
Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; weekend and public-holiday hours vary by season
Closed: Mondays and January 1
Admission: Free
Website: Seoul Museum of Art, 《Kim Heecheon: Moles》
 

Yoo Youngkuk: 《A Mountain Within Me》 — At the Origins of Korean Abstraction
 
To understand Korean contemporary art, it is necessary to look not only at artists working today, but also at how earlier generations developed their own languages of modern art under particular historical conditions.
 
《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》 at the Seoul Museum of Art commemorates the 110th anniversary of the birth of Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002), a pioneer of Korean abstract art. It is the largest retrospective of his work to date and the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s new “Korean Modern Masters” series.
 
The exhibition spans nearly six decades, from Yoo’s early abstract experiments at Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo in 1935 to the abstract imagery of his later years. More than 170 paintings, reliefs, photographs, drawings, and archival materials—including previously unseen works—trace the formation and transformation of a singular visual language.
 
For Yoo, the mountain was not a motif for naturalistic representation. He simplified and reconstructed forms derived from nature through lines, planes, and intense colors, developing them into a distinctive abstract language. The mountain that recurs throughout his work is at once a representation of a real landscape, a repository of memory, and a fundamental structure through which to experiment with color, form, and pictorial order.
 
His practice unfolded amid the upheavals of modern Korean history: Japanese colonial rule, liberation, the Korean War, postwar reconstruction, and industrialization. Although Yoo did not depict historical events directly, neither did he retreat into a formalism detached from his era. He resisted the state-sponsored academic establishment represented by the National Art Exhibition and pursued abstraction as an independent avant-garde artist, continually refining and renewing his language.
 
Yoo combined Korea’s natural environment and the experiences of his own time with the grammar of international abstraction to build an original painterly world. His abstraction should therefore be understood not as a mere influence or offshoot of Western modernism, but as an autonomous modernism constructed within Korea’s particular historical conditions.
 
The exhibition illuminates not only the formation and development of Korean abstraction, but also what it means for an artist to refuse to be swept along by the rapid changes of an era and instead refine a personal language over an entire lifetime.
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: 2026 Korean Modern Masters, 《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》
Dates: May 19–October 25, 2026
Venue: First-floor galleries, Seoul Museum of Art, Seosomun Main Branch
Address: 61 Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul
Works: Approximately 170 paintings, reliefs, photographs, drawings, and archival materials
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.; Friday, 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; weekend and public-holiday hours vary by season
Closed: Mondays and January 1
Admission: Free
Website: Seoul Museum of Art, 《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》
 

Yun Hyong-keun — Where Art and Life Meet
 
Yun Hyong-keun’s exhibitions offer a rare opportunity to encounter his paintings and then visit the house in which he lived and worked.
 
《reimagine Yun Hyong-keun》 at PKM Gallery traces the evolution of Yun’s practice from the 1970s through the 2000s, bringing together approximately 30 works, including large-scale paintings and works on hanji.
 
From the 1970s onward, Yun (1928–2007) developed his ‘Cheonji-mun’ (“Gate of Heaven and Earth”) paintings by repeatedly allowing burnt umber and ultramarine blue to soak into the surface, helping to shape a major current within Korean Dansaekhwa.
 
In his paintings, pigment does not sit on the surface so much as permeate the fabric. The colors overlap without fully merging, while descending vertical fields of dark color and the empty spaces between them create tension and equilibrium. Although the compositions are reduced to minimal color and form, they contain a profound accumulation of material, time, and traces of repeated action.
 
Beginning with representative works from the 1970s, when the ‘Cheonji-mun’ paintings became established, the exhibition also presents lyrical early paintings and later works that move toward even greater restraint. Archival materials focus on the home and studio that formed the ground of Yun’s life and practice.
 
Yun is now one of the most internationally recognized figures associated with Korean Dansaekhwa. His work is held in major museum collections, including MMCA and Leeum Museum of Art, Tate Modern in London, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.
 
The experience extends beyond the gallery. On September 1, 《Yun Hyong-keun House》 in Seogyo-dong, Seoul, will open to the public for the first time.
 
The house stands on land first allocated to Yun’s father-in-law, Kim Whanki, as part of a government housing program in 1963. Yun lived there from 1967. In 1983, after demolishing the original house, he commissioned a new building designed by his younger brother Yun Do-keun, then a professor of architecture at Hongik University. Yun himself took an active role in the architectural process, contributing ideas about the function and form of the space and the choice of materials.
 
The conservation and restoration project sought to preserve not only the architectural structure and finishes, but also the original arrangement of the artist’s furniture, ceramics, books, and household objects. The ground floor houses the studio, artworks, an archive room, and a video room, while the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom upstairs retain traces of family life.
 
For Yun, art was not separate from life. The act of making a painting, the care with which he selected and arranged objects, and the way he organized his home and studio all belonged to a single aesthetic order.
 
Seeing Yun’s restrained paintings in the gallery and then entering the domestic and working spaces in which they emerged reveals dimensions of his art that cannot be fully understood through the art-historical category of Dansaekhwa alone.

 
Exhibition Information 1
 
Exhibition: 《reimagine Yun Hyong-keun》
Dates: August 26–October 3, 2026
Venue: PKM Gallery and PKM+
Address: 40 Samcheong-ro 7-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
Last admission: 5:30 p.m.
Website: PKM Gallery, 《reimagine Yun Hyong-keun》
 

Exhibition Information 2
 
Venue: 《Yun Hyong-keun House》
Open to the public: September 1–October 17, 2026
Address: 19-17 Wausan-ro 21-gil, Mapo-gu, Seoul
Admission: KRW 20,000
Sessions: 11:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 2:30 p.m., and 4:00 p.m.
Visit format: Maximum eight visitors per session; approximately 60 minutes; all sessions accompanied by a docent
Reservations: Advance booking required
Website: PKM Gallery, 《Yun Hyong-keun House》


 

Kim Bohie: 《TOWARDS: There Was Light》 — Nature Reimagined through Light and Time
 
During Seoul Art Week, Gallery Hyundai in Samcheong-dong presents Kim Bohie’s solo exhibition 《TOWARDS: There Was Light.》
 
For more than four decades, Kim has closely observed nature and translated its rhythms of life and time into painting. The garden and sea, trees and flowers, fruit and animals she encounters in Jeju recur throughout her work.
 
Her paintings, however, are not naturalistic reproductions of the landscapes before her. Nature, observed over time, is reconfigured through memory and imagination. Plants, sea, and sky seen from different viewpoints and at different moments overlap within a single picture, while light and color that could not coexist in an actual landscape create a new order.
 
This is Kim’s first solo exhibition in Korea in four years, following 《the Days》 at the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022. It is also her first solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai in 38 years, since 《The Third Kim Bohie Solo Exhibition》 in 1988.
 
The exhibition features approximately 30 paintings, including new works from the Towards series depicting the artist’s garden and the sea in Jeju, flowers and fruit, and her dog Leo. Of particular note is the opportunity to see the monumental painting The Days (2022)—presented in the Unlimited sector at Art Basel in Basel in 2026—again in Seoul.
 
The Days unfolds the morning sea, night sky, earth, and plants across one continuous pictorial field. Rather than capturing a landscape at a specific moment, the work condenses the course of a day and the cycles of nature into a single scene. Standing before it, viewers encounter a landscape in which light and color from different times of day flow into one another.
 
Kim has neither simply inherited the conventions of traditional Korean painting nor uncritically adopted Western painterly forms. On canvas and hanji, she repeatedly applies and dries layers of pigment mixed with water and animal glue, developing the absorption and empty space of East Asian painting into the color fields and expanded surfaces of contemporary painting. The accumulated layers of color gradually permeate the picture plane, creating her work’s distinctive depth and density.
 
What matters in Kim’s painting is not merely what she depicts. More important is how several kinds of time converge within a single work: the time spent looking at nature, the time in which landscape becomes a mental image through memory, and the time required to reconstruct it on the surface.
 
The subtitle “There Was Light” evokes a moment of creation, when light appears in darkness and the world begins to reveal itself. Here, light is both the physical condition that makes nature visible and a painterly element that connects color and time, disparate beings and landscapes, within a single image.
 
The exhibition title also incorporates ‘Towards’, the name Kim has long used for the series. Rather than signifying arrival at a final destination, “Towards” suggests a gaze and an attitude continually directed beyond what is already there. Just as the artist’s vision moves from seed to garden, from garden to sea, and from a small living presence nearby to the space beyond the horizon, her paintings never settle into a single, finished landscape.
 
Kim’s practice is often described simply as “paintings of Jeju’s nature,” but this exhibition invites a broader reading. The nature she paints is less a beautiful landscape belonging to a particular region than a living world continually transformed by light and time, life and memory.
 
If Yoo Youngkuk reconfigured mountains through line, plane, and color to create a distinctive language of Korean abstraction, Kim has opened another horizon in modern Korean painting by extending the materials and sensibilities of Korean painting into the expanded field of contemporary painting.
 
 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition: 《Kim Bohie: TOWARDS: There Was Light》
Dates: August 26–October 18, 2026
Venue: Gallery Hyundai
Address: 14 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul
Works: Approximately 30 paintings, including new works from the ‘Towards’ series and 〈The Days〉 (2022)
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
Closed: Mondays
Website: Gallery Hyundai, 《TOWARDS: There Was Light》
 

 
Together, these seven exhibitions span different generations, media, and aesthetics in Korean art. Yoo Youngkuk and Yun Hyong-keun reveal how Korean modern art transformed abstraction—an international language—into distinct visual worlds, while Kim Bohie carries the materials and sensibilities of Korean painting into the expanded field of contemporary painting.
 
Do Ho Suh and Koo Jeong A extend the idea of space beyond physical architecture or place to encompass memory and movement, perception and energy. Yang Ah Ham traces the relationship between social systems and the individual through long-term research and narrative structures, while Kim Heecheon addresses new forms of perception and identity in an era when digital technology has already become part of reality.
 
If Kiaf and Frieze Seoul present the current state of global contemporary art in a brief yet concentrated form, Seoul’s museums and exhibition spaces reveal the histories and changing trajectories of Korean art.
 
The singular appeal of Seoul Art Week lies in the way global contemporary art intersects with the layered history of Korean art within a single city.