In March 2026, the concurrent openings of Tino Sehgal and Damien Hirst in Seoul are widely regarded as the most significant art events in Korea this year, both in scale and in discursive weight.
 
These exhibitions are not merely major presentations of internationally renowned artists. Rather, they offer a rare and dramatic opportunity to compare—at opposite ends of the spectrum—how contemporary art has generated value over the past three decades.
 

 
Tino Sehgal: Immaterial Sculpture and the Reconfiguration of the Institution
 
Sehgal does not produce artworks—at least not in the conventional sense. He creates no objects and prohibits photographic and video documentation. His works exist solely as “constructed situations.” Within structures precisely choreographed by the artist, performers speak to visitors, move, sing, or pose questions. The relational event that unfolds in that moment constitutes the work itself.
 
His background in dance and political economy is central to understanding his practice. Sehgal connects art to questions of labor, exchange, institutional frameworks, and the production of value. Although his works are sold, transactions occur without written contracts, relying instead on oral agreements. This deliberate inversion of legal and material conventions destabilizes the foundations of the art institution and reactivates the question of what an artwork is from within the system itself. The work exists only in its enactment and disappears once the enactment concludes.
 
Signature works such as This Progress and These Associations incorporate the visitor directly into the structure of the piece. One does not simply “view” the work but undergoes it. The experience cannot be repeated or replicated. Sehgal transforms the museum from a site of object preservation into a space where relationships are produced.

His solo exhibitions at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou, along with the Golden Lion awarded at the 2013 Venice Biennale, marked the moment when immaterial practice moved decisively into the center of the international institutional sphere. Sehgal is widely regarded as an artist who reconfigured post-relational aesthetics at the level of institutional structure.

Korean institutions have long operated within object-centered and archive-based exhibition systems. Sehgal’s exhibition simultaneously reconsiders archival logic, acquisition models, conservation strategies, and the role of the viewer. The exhibition functions less as a display of works than as a structural experiment testing the museum apparatus in real time. Immateriality here is not absence, but a method for exposing the premises of the institution.

From this perspective, Sehgal’s exhibition exceeds the category of spectacle. It proposes a reconsideration of the operational structure of the contemporary Korean museum itself.

Damien Hirst

Image, Death, and the Construction of Modern Myth

Hirst emerged in the 1990s as a leading figure of the Young British Artists (YBA), becoming one of the most emblematic artists to reveal the entanglement between contemporary art and the global art market. Works such as the formaldehyde-preserved shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991), the Spot Paintings, Butterfly paintings, and Medicine cabinet installations combine symbolic systems of life and death, faith and science, and consumption culture.

Hirst’s practice does not separate aesthetic concerns from market structures. In 2008, he bypassed the traditional gallery system by selling works directly at auction, strategically engaging the mechanisms of the art market. This act exposed the relationship between art and capital while igniting debate around branding, industrialization, and artistic authorship.
 
Critically, his work juxtaposes death and the sublime, ornamentation and repetition, industrial production and spectacle. The studio system dismantles the traditional notion of the artist’s handcrafted authorship, foregrounding instead conceptual design and delegated fabrication. It symbolizes how contemporary art operates less as an individual artifact and more as a structural system.

If Sehgal’s exhibitions are remembered as experiences without residue, Hirst’s exhibitions are remembered through the accumulation of images. Yet both artists treat art not merely as an aesthetic object but as a structure through which value is produced. One empties the structure; the other amplifies it.
 
As Korea has rapidly emerged as a major hub within the global art market, these exhibitions resonate beyond celebrity appeal. They render visible the tensions between art and capital, institution and brand, popular spectacle and critical value.
 
If Sehgal unsettles the institution through ‘immateriality’, Hirst makes its mechanisms visible through ‘material excess’. One approaches the question of art through radical subtraction; the other through maximal exposure. In March 2026, Seoul finds itself in the unusual position of witnessing these two strategies unfold simultaneously.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Tino Sehgal

Exhibition Title:《Tino Sehgal》
Venue: Leeum Museum of Art
Dates: March 3 – June 28, 2026
Address: 60-16 Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea
Website: https://www.leeum.org
 

Damien Hirst

Exhibition Title:〈There Is No Truth, Yet Everything Is Possible》
Venue: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (Seoul)
Dates: March 20 – June 28, 2026
Address: 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
Website: https://www.mmca.go.kr