14 Exhibitions Not to Miss During Seoul Art Week 2025
From Lee Bul’s sweeping “Grand Narrative” to Bae Yoon Hwan’s biting dystopian allegories, the city offers a wealth of must-see shows beyond the fairs.
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Four years into Frieze’s run in Seoul alongside the long-established and ever-evolving Kiaf, the fair has become a catalyst for one of Asia’s most dynamic art weeks. Even before Frieze’s arrival, Seoul had a robust art ecosystem anchored by strong infrastructure, established galleries and active institutions. Today, the South Korean capital attracts a steady stream of international visitors, this week and beyond, bolstered by the global reach of Korean culture driven in part by the broad popularity of K-pop and other imports.
During Seoul Art Week, major museums, galleries and nonprofits are rolling out their strongest programming, creating a citywide activation. As Kiaf SEOUL and Frieze coordinate their schedules to spotlight different parts of the city each night, Observer has compiled a guide to this year’s must-see events to help you navigate the richness and growing diversity of Seoul’s art scene.
Exhibition to see
- "Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now"
- "Antony Gormley: Inextricable"
- "Hanna Woo: POOMSAE"
- "Ugo Rondinone: in beauty bright"
- James Turell's "The Return"
- Jeongeun Han's "Vanishing Point"
- Bo Kim's "Lifelines"
- "Ann Veronica Janssens: September in Seoul"
- Kimsooja's "To Breathe – Sunhyewon"
- "Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon"
- "Mark Bradford: Keep Walking"
- "Pigment Compound"
- "Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy"
- Bae Yoon Hwan's "Deep Dive"
"Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now"
- Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul
- Through January 4, 2026
In the past year, the Samsung-owned Leeum Museum has staged some of the most ambitious and experimental exhibitions of Seoul Art Week, including last year’s extensive survey of Anicka Yi’s visionary practice, and this year the spotlight turns to Lee Bul, one of South Korea’s most celebrated contemporary artists, renowned for her distinctive approach to exploring the interactions between humans and non-humans and exposing their complex, often precarious interdependencies. Fresh off her Met Facade Commission in New York, Bul presents an expansive journey through the many phases of her futuristic “Grand Narrative,” co-curated by M+ and the Leeum Museum of Art, which is the most comprehensive survey of her career to date, spanning more than four decades from the 1980s to the present. Working across performance, sculpture, installation, architecture, printmaking and media art, Bul has undertaken a relentless act of “world-building,” crafting an ever-evolving universe that reflects on contemporary innovation, interrogates the shifting relationship between humanity, nature and technology, and speculates on dystopian scenarios alongside possible future alternatives. The exhibition will travel to Hong Kong’s M+ in spring 2026 before continuing to other international venues.
"Antony Gormley: Inextricable"
- Thaddeus Ropac and White Cube, Seoul
- Through November 8, 2025
Antony Gormley is set for a major moment in Seoul this September with a two-part exhibition opening during art week across Thaddaeus Ropac and White Cube, alongside his ongoing show "Drawing on Space" at Museum SAN in Wonju, which runs until 30 November 2025. Long celebrated in Asia and particularly among South Korean collectors, Gormley has used sculpture to explore the body as both a site and a nexus of relationships between the individual and the world, pursuing a sustained meditation on humanity’s relationship with space, time and the environment. For his Seoul debut, he confronts the reality that more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, examining the entanglement between the human body and the urban environment, with his solitary figures inviting viewers to refine their own physicality and spatial awareness while reflecting on scale, position and our place within a broader web of relations and interdependencies. At Thaddaeus Ropac, works from the “Extended Strapworks,” “Cast Knot” and “Open Block” series probe internal physical states and their relationship to architectural space, while White Cube presents pieces from the “Blockwork,” “Bunker” and “Beamer” series, which reconfigure the body through the forms and logic of the built world.
"Hanna Woo: POOMSAE"
- G Gallery, Seoul
- Through September 27, 2025
Coming into wider international attention after receiving the inaugural Artist Prize at the first edition of Frieze Seoul, South Korean artist Hannah Woo has long used textiles and fabric as visual and material embodiments of the relationships within and beyond the human body. Rejecting fixed or finite form, her sculptural assemblages stage complex systems of fluid connections, transformations and opposites, embracing possibilities in their dialectical tension without collapsing into polarization. At the same time, Woo’s work confronts the vulnerability traditionally associated with the female body, uncovering an inherent resilience that accompanies life’s processes and states of awareness; as fabric folds swell into exaggerated forms, they assume distinctive, almost figurative characters, asserting emancipation through the strength of fabric and the labor of needlework while remaining open to surreal, dreamlike narratives suggested by their material presence. Highly theatrical and deliberately choreographed, her installations stage encounters with matter itself, where objects animate and assume character only in dialectical relation to their viewers. While her earlier series foregrounded a distinctly female perspective, examining the challenges, vulnerabilities and transformations of women’s bodies across time, in this new body of work Woo turns her inquiry toward broader systems of societal and emotional relation that all living beings establish with their material and physical surroundings, exploring the interdependencies of body, environment and imagination.
"Ugo Rondinone: in beauty bright"
- Gladstone Gallery, Seoul
- Through October 18, 2025
The gallery is dedicating its prime Seoul slot to Ugo Rondinone, a favorite among Korean collectors, with his first solo exhibition at the Seoul location debuting new large-scale multicolored lake paintings inspired by childhood memories of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. True to his style, Rondinone pursues an extreme simplification of the landscape in these works, reducing it to bold fields of color that convey shifting horizons, luminous atmospheres and elemental natural motifs. His intent is not to depict the scenery literally but to capture its emotional and atmospheric essence, offering a poetic evocation of place rather than a direct representation.
James Turell's "The Return"
- Pace Gallery, Seoul
- Through September 27, 2025
Since opening its location in Itaewon, Pace has consistently staged museum-quality exhibitions timed with Seoul Art Week, and this year the gallery presents five installations by James Turrell, including a new site-specific Wedge created for the occasion. A leading figure of the California Light and Space movement, Turrell has long explored light’s power to shape perception and transform environments, creating immersive experiences that heighten the viewer’s awareness of the act of seeing—as he describes it, they require “seeing yourself seeing.” Challenging the boundaries of materiality and immateriality, he has made light itself into a sculptural medium, and alongside the installations the exhibition also features photographs and works on paper that illuminate his process and provide insight into the construction of Roden Crater, the monumental project he has been developing since the 1970s in an extinct volcano in Arizona that he is transforming into a vast naked-eye observatory.
Jeongeun Han's "Vanishing Point"
- FOUNDRY SEOUL
- Through October 4, 2025
Haunting yet seductive, Korean artist Jeongeun Han’s paintings embrace the sublimity of fleeting moments, reaching for even the smallest breath of the cosmos' infinite power. The dramatic, nebulous yet visionary nature of her scenes reflects themes of vastness and stillness, presence and absence, as we perceive the universe through the limited lens of our finite physical world. Han explores the balance between dissolution and permanence, using elements like ice, water, fire and light to capture themes of disappearance and loss. "Vanishing Point" reflects the slow decay of monumental forms and their emotional residue, questioning what remains in memory once a memorial fades and which emotions must endure. The works in the exhibition ultimately stage a human attempt to confront the overwhelming intensity of cosmic phenomena, pursuing eternal forms while acknowledging the necessity of facing our finitude and embracing the potential for new meaning within the remnants of disappearance and loss.
Bo Kim's "Lifelines"
- BHAK, Seoul
- Through September 27, 2025
Working with layers of hanji, sand and pigment, South Korean artist Bo Kim gently records the visible traces of time—wrinkles, sloping shoulders, strands of white hair. This is both an exercise in time and an act of emotional archiving, as she transforms the canvas into a memorial repository of marks and elements that accumulate through the act of making, experiencing and existing within a space. From this sedimentation, tree-like forms subtly emerge, reenacting an organic germination from the primordial essence of particles, matter and energy. The canvas becomes a stage for philosophical and emotional meditation on permanence and impermanence, questioning where we come from and who has quietly supported us as we’ve grown. Curated by Andy St. Louis, the exhibition is Kim’s third with the gallery.
"Ann Veronica Janssens: September in Seoul"
- Esther Schipper, Seoul
- Through October 25, 2025
For years Ann Veronica Janssens has explored the limits and evocative possibilities of the body’s perception of the world and of itself within it, crafting works that appear strikingly simple yet rekindle the magical sense of discovery in a child’s first encounter with the world. Masters of light, color and natural optical phenomena, her pieces create vivid material encounters that heighten awareness of the mutability and transience of perception. For her Seoul debut, Janssens presents sculptures made from glass and light that highlight the Minimalist influence evident in her elegant simplicity, with rectangular structures composed of 4, 32 or 75 elements in shades of dark green, green-yellow, pink and lilac. Each glass brick, with its subtle variations and tiny bubbles, interrupts the rigor of the grid, introducing singularity within repetition and evoking shifting architectures of light and color seemingly “contained” within the objects. Often described as “performative sculptures,” her works continually shift and animate through viewer interaction, introducing a dynamic quality that makes the material seem as though it were alchemically “drinking the light” of its environment. Extending her exploration of perception, she also presents a new light sculpture—from a series initiated in 2005—that envelops and reshapes the surrounding architecture, traveling through the staircase to transform space into an immersive emotional experience modulated by light and color.
Kimsooja's "To Breathe – Sunhyewon"
- Podo Museum pop-up, Sunhyewon
- September 3 - October 19, 2025
Internationally acclaimed Korean artist Kimsooja is taking over a traditional Seoul Hanok with a site-specific installation "To Breathe – Sunhyewon," organized by Podo Museum and coinciding with her current presentation at Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk on view until 9 November. Both interventions feature her signature motif of bottari—bundles of clothing donated by local residents that reference traditional Korean cloth wrappings and symbolize states of flux and travel, arrival and departure and the personal histories people carry with them. Her work consistently addresses the interconnectedness of humanity, the fragility of cultural and personal memory and the power of simple materials to hold profound narratives of identity and existence. Moving fluidly between sculptural and environmental dimensions as well as more ephemeral forms, Kimsooja creates poetic narrative spaces of meditation that invite viewers to reflect on their own place within the flow of migration, time and collective experience. "I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone," wrote the artist.
"Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon"
- Lehmann Maupin, Seoul
- Through October 25, 2025
Marking Fernández’s debut at the gallery’s Seoul location—and her first exhibition in the city in over a decade—the show extends her ongoing investigation into subterranean landscapes where geological and human-made layers form complex soil horizons. Featuring a glazed ceramic wall installation and luminous sculptural panels that evoke aqueous realms, her inquiry here dives into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing shifting densities and transparencies that expand her visual and conceptual language beyond the terrestrial and physical to embrace a more otherworldly and alchemical register. For more than three decades Fernández has examined the paradoxes within landscape—the visible and the hidden, the celestial and the earthly, the fierce and the fragile, the material and the ephemeral—revealing landscapes not as fixed geographies but as embodied sites at once vast and intimate, private and collective, where poetics and politics intertwine and expose layered histories, identities and cosmologies embedded in strata and sediments. Works like Stacked Landscapes, composed of horizontal relief striations in charcoal, sand and blue pigments on aluminum, suggest bands of geological formations or fluid tides of liquid matter merging with alchemical and aqueous realms while also evoking introspective states. Ultimately these pieces function less as representations than as abstract metaphors for the human condition of “being in a place,” immersed in webs of relation and interdependency that undercut illusions of anthropocentric control or fixed realities to remind us instead that everything is subject to endless cycles of transformation, matter and energy in perpetual flux.
"Mark Bradford: Keep Walking"
- Amorepacific Museum of Art
- Through January 4, 2026
Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford is presenting one of his most expansive exhibitions in Seoul, featuring several of his monumental paper-based installations. At the center of the show is Float (2019), a floor-based work composed of hundreds of hand-torn strips of canvas, paper and rope. Reinventing and reimagining his earlier Waterfall (2015), in which fibrous layers cascaded from ceiling beams to the floor, Float challenges traditional modes of engagement with art through its interplay of color and materiality. By implicating the body as an active participant, this site-specific intervention shifts preconceived notions of how artworks are encountered within museological settings and gestures toward something both phenomenological and transcendental: the lived experience of motion as an aesthetic and political act of awareness.
"Pigment Compound"
- P21 Gallery, Seoul
- Through September 19, 2025
This group show could not find a better place or moment, given how South Korea’s cosmetics industry has peaked—driven by the global export success of Korean brands—and how cosmetic interventions have become so normalized they border on obsession within the country’s society. Featuring a lineup of established and emerging names including So Young Park, Pamela Rosenkranz, Diane Severin Nguyen, Haena Yoo, Haneyl Choi, Sylvie Fleury, Simon Fujiwara, Sanja Ivekovic, Anna Munk and Ju Young Kim, the exhibition at P21 Gallery examines how artists engage with the material world of cosmetics consumer culture. Exploring the intersections of beauty and capitalism, the show highlights the emotional intensity of cosmetics and makeup, revealing how the body, skin and psyche are metaphorically reconstructed amid the expansion of the consumer goods market—a market fueled by spontaneous, conscious responses to users’ trauma. Rather than offering a simple expression of beauty, the exhibition proposes a psychological, sensory and materialist aesthetic composed of powders, lotions, sprays and plastic packaging, raising urgent questions about our relationship with our own bodies.
"Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy"
- Art Sonje, Seoul
- September 3, 2025 - February 1, 2026.
Another major South Korea debut this year comes from Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas, with a show that promises to deconstruct the accumulated time and institutional structures of the museum over the past three decades through his expansive cosmic imagination. Known for large-scale site-specific installations that transform spaces into immersive environments where time, history and imagination collapse into one another, Villar Rojas’s new project imagines a moment when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens collaborate in the birth of meaning after encountering dinosaur fossils. Using fictional prehistories and speculative futures as a framework, he will transform the entire museum into a single monumental sculpture—a stage for experimentation where architecture, history and imagination converge. Spanning from the basement to the third floor, the presentation will include site-specific installations as well as works from his ongoing “The End of Imagination” series, begun in 2022, offering a total environment that destabilizes linear notions of time and challenges the very function of the museum itself.
Bae Yoon Hwan's "Deep Dive"
- Space K, Seoul
- Through November 9, 2025
Space K is dedicating its entire venue to the vivid yet haunting imaginative universe of rising South Korean artist Bae Yoon Hwan. Characterized by a darkly dystopian and satirical tone, his work weaves together personal experience, mythological reference and social commentary in visual narratives that are as captivating as they are alarming, confronting the paradoxes of the civilization humanity has reached. Translating without filters the most urgent symptoms of our era, Bae denounces the dissolution of communities and the ecological and humanitarian disasters of our time, rearticulating them through his own allegorical language.
