Kicking off the September artwork honest calendar, Frieze Seoul returns to the South Korean capital alongside the nation’s first worldwide artwork honest, Kiaf SEOUL, for Seoul Artwork Week, and town’s vibrant artwork scene is able to activate with a wealthy program of gallery and museum exhibitions you gained’t wish to miss. Most main occasions throughout town shall be on Hannam Night time (September 3), Samcheong Night time (September 4) and Cheongdam Night time (September 5), with the requisite after-parties to observe, although loads of the must-see exhibits run by means of the top of the month and even the top of the 12 months. Observer pored over the Seoul Artwork Week schedule and put collectively a listing of exhibitions artwork lovers visiting Seoul for the festivals ought to prioritize of their off hours.
Anicka Yi at Leeum Museum Of Artwork
Marking Yi’s first complete museum exhibition in Asia, “There Exists One other Evolution, However In This One” presents a whole overview of the visionary follow of the Korean-born and New York-based artist. Blurring the road between pure and synthetic, artwork and science, Anicka Yi’s works are sometimes made with natural and ephemeral supplies akin to micro organism, fungi, scent or flowers—pure processes are on the coronary heart of her inventive follow and analysis. This interprets into advanced installations that unveil organic and chemical dynamics whereas highlighting the esthetic potential of pure components of their pure kind (not contaminated by human interventions). Drawing inspiration for its title from the enigmatic nature of Zen Buddhist koans, the exhibition offers distinctive insights into Yi’s distinctive inventive universe whereas reflecting meditative and non secular shifts in her latest works, that are highly effective poetic metaphors of human and non-human relations and interactions. Established by the Samsung Basis of Tradition, the museum is a must-visit cease on any Seoul artwork journey, with its everlasting installations by artists like Olafur Eliasson and Daniel Buren.
Anicka Yi’ “There Exists One other Evolution, However In This One” opens on September 5 and runs by means of December 29.
“Connecting Our bodies: Asian Ladies Artists” on the Nationwide Museum of Fashionable and Modern Artwork, Korea (MMCA)
Via 130 works by girls artists from eleven Asian nations, this elaborate exhibition on the MMCA embarks on an examination of post-Sixties artwork by Asian girls from the angle of corporeality. Articulated in six sections—“Choreograph Life,” “Versatile Territories of Sexuality,” “Our bodies·God(desse)s·Cosmology,” “Avenue Performances,” “Repeating Gestures-Our bodies·Objects·Language,” and “Our bodies as Turning into‒Connecting Our bodies”—the present explores varied tales about numerous, polyphonous our bodies and the way girls have been outlined and claimed their very own presence in each intimate and social areas by means of their our bodies and identities. The present contains well-known names in addition to not too long ago rediscovered ones; there are works by Yayoi Kusama, Pacita Abad, Mire Lee, Pinarek Sanpitak, Agnes Arellano and Yoko Ono, to say just a few. Extra importantly, the present goals to transcend a simplistic confrontation between Asian girls and their Westerner friends, in addition to males, and as an alternative current these artists as brokers embodied in multilayered methods in a translational discourse that’s deeply grounded of their occasions. The exhibition finally presents the various methods Asian girls have explored their our bodies and their identities in a totalizing integration of thought/sensation and artwork/life whereas difficult how totally different ideologies (e.g., patriarchy, capitalism and nationalism) have influenced their bodily selves and psychologies.
“Connecting Our bodies: Asian Ladies Artists” opens on September 3 and stays on view by means of March 3.
Nari Ward at Lehmann Maupin
This American artist would be the focus of a double presentation between Seoul and New York at Lehmann Maupin, coinciding with the respective artwork weeks. Introducing Nari Ward in South Korea with a solo presentation, the gallery will present copper panel works, sculpture and wall-based installations that deal with points of therapeutic and care that form native communities—particularly in Harlem, the artist’s longtime neighborhood in New York. Titled “ongoin,” the present explores the artist’s dedication to interpretations of non secular ceremonies and rituals, probing the facility of objects to convey cultural recollections and collective energies. Utilizing supplies and objects as each signifiers and metaphors, he reactivates and recontextualizes them to confront advanced social and political dynamics surrounding race, migration, democracy and our sense of group. Along with his object-oriented follow, Ward offers with prevalent points within the socio-political cloth of america whereas additionally addressing considerations that resonate on a world degree. The exhibition follows Ward’s latest retrospective, “Floor Break,” at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and runs in parallel this September together with his set up at The Armory Present in New York.
Nari Ward’s “ongoin” runs by means of October 19.
Kylie Manning at House-Okay
Rising artwork star Kylie Manning is a great distance from her first exhibits at Nameless Gallery in New York, having joined Tempo final 12 months, and now she has her first institutional present in Asia at House-Okay Seoul. The Brooklyn-based painter offers with the custom of abstraction and gesture as filtered by means of the lens of up to date German portray. Whereas incomes a grasp’s diploma from the New York Academy of Artwork, Manning went to Leipzig, Germany, the place she had a studio down the corridor from artists together with Christiane Baumgartner and Neo Rauch, working near the New Leipzig College, which profoundly influenced her strategy that encompasses abstraction and surrealism. Her energetic swath of colours fluidly sweeps throughout the canvases, then crashes as waves and opens them to permit some solutions of figures to emerge. Magmatically fluid as stormy oceanic waters, her summary composition disrupts the exact order of actuality and associated linguistic codes to translate the extreme flux of psychic energies. The sequence on view has been impressed primarily by coastal experiences from her upbringing in Alaska and Mexico and the overlapping of these recollections with those of the “Yellow Sea” that hyperlinks China and the Korean peninsula. The immersive dimension of the present permits the guests to dive into these abstractions, meditating on ‘what’s distilled after a tide removes extra particles, noise and marks’ as a robust metaphor for the way our emotional recollections and psyche work.
Kylie Manning’s “Yellow Sea” runs by means of November 10.
Derrick Adams at Gagosian / Amorepacific
Gagosian hasn’t but joined different worldwide galleries in opening an outpost in Seoul. However this 12 months, it does have a pop-up exhibition in collaboration with Amorepacific, the world-renowned Korean magnificence firm. Along with his debut present in South Korea, American artist Derrick Adams is interacting instantly with the model and the area designed by David Chipperfield with a sequence of latest work that includes show home windows at magnificence provide shops he photographed close to his Brooklyn studio and around the globe. Taking part in with the notion of magnificence and elegance and the way these are each formed and influenced by cultural identities, teams of model heads adorned with colourful wigs are framed by molded reliefs of bricks as collaged and dimensional components that distinction with the flatness of the work. As typical in his follow, Adams deliberately manipulates notions of flatness and plasticity, actual and fantasy, creating implausible trompe d’oeil that supply commentaries on city life and, particularly, how Black id and tradition are expressed. In considered one of his inventive statements, he feedback: “What can I reveal that has not been proven? Black folks—not entertaining, simply being, residing. Letting folks take care of that as actuality.” Drawing from the methods of Pop contemplating industrial show, client merchandise, id and need, Derrick Adams freely blends and permits to coexist geometric motifs that evoke Cubism and African masks, with references to the historical past of portraiture and adornment from historical Egyptian and different traditions, tracing right here the genesis of this act of societal illustration of each standing and cultural expression.
Derrick Adams’s “The Strip” opens on September 3 and runs by means of October 12.
Ho Jae Kim at Gana Artwork
Impressed by the spacial perfection of Renaissance artist and mathematician Piero Della Francesca, Brooklyn-based Korean painter Ho Jae Kim makes extremely enigmatic work the place the sense of actuality and time is suspended. Making an attempt to acquire the identical perfection in managing area whereas not being excellent at math, the artist discovered within the potentialities supplied by new expertise a option to examine in minute element the compositions which can be later depicted in his work. Transferring this composition onto canvas through a laborious means of layering oil paint and ink, his inventive course of proceeds concurrently in an additive and subtractive approach, replicating some mechanisms of how our unconscious minds work. Nourished by an unlimited set of references from literature, movie, philosophy and artwork historical past built-in with private experiences, his topics are most frequently portrayed dealing with their solitude in entrance of nature or the relics of our civilization. Many of the artist’s work is impressed by this “purgatory” notion, conceived as a transitional place. Nonetheless, the whole lot there’s suspended in a possible or unsure existence. “Past the non secular, there are a lot of purgatories in our up to date lives once we are neither right here nor there however someplace,” Kim informed Observer. “Whether or not it’s looking for one’s id, sitting on an extended flight between nations, or strolling below infinite scaffolds and development websites in New York, we exist in and round indeterminate states.”
Ho Jae Kim’s “Castaway” runs by means of September 22.
Myriu Yoon and Astrid Terrazas at Foundry Seoul
Foundry quickly made its identify within the worldwide artwork scene with its thrilling program. Throughout Seoul Artwork Week, the gallery can have on view a captivating exhibition presenting thirty-three new work by Korean artist Myriu Yoon set towards the backdrop of wetlands. Titled “Do Wetlands Scare You?” the present is impressed by these liminal areas, “a spot the place the bottom is sunken and at all times full of water.” Wetlands are important habitats for all kinds of crops and animals, however on the identical time, they perform as highly effective metaphors for a particular psychological and symbolic area. Figurative in the way in which they painting buddies and friends captured with the iPhone Reside Pictures function, Yoon’s work additionally turn into symbolic and extra summary intermediaries of sensations and archetypes the artist seeks to discover whereas interacting with native myths and folklore. The gallery can also be presenting for the primary time in South Korea the work of Queens-based artist Astrid Terrazas. Equally dense with symbolism and tapping into ancestral archetypes, Terrazas’s works hyperlink with distinctive Mexican ancestral folklore, mixing it along with her personal lived experiences and unearthly transfiguration. Titled “Los Rostros Falsos,” the present presents the artist’s universe, a visible dream diary stuffed with transient figures, archaic symbols and chimerical narratives. This new physique of labor by the artist explores the complexities of the menstrual cycle with a sequence of allegories and symbolic figurations that join the feminine physique and its ancestral wild energies with the broader universe of nature.
Myriu Yoon’s “Do Wetlands Scare You?” and Astrid Terrazas’ “Los Rostros Falsos” are on view by means of October 5.
Do Ho Suh at Artwork Sonje Heart and Frieze Seoul
Korean artist Do Ho Suh is understood for his ghostly-appealing short-term structure that imagines various worlds. With life-sized replicas of architectural areas, the artist explores the connections between the physique, area and the atmosphere. Organized across the idea of “hypothesis,” the present at Artwork Sonje Heart unpacks the artist’s means of creation, the place profound contemplation follows a equally deep essential interrogation of the interactions between people, communities and the atmosphere. Slightly than presenting “accomplished works,” this exhibition visually represents Suh’s traces of thought, specializing in the method, ideas and investigations that lie on the middle of the artist’s follow. Significantly fascinating is Suh’s Bridge Venture, by which he envisions his ‘good dwelling’ situated on the equidistant level between his two dwelling cities (New York and Seoul) within the Pacific Ocean. This exhibition unveils for the primary time the work’s new iteration, which incorporates Suh’s present dwelling in London: the artist’s “good dwelling” is now equidistant between three cities within the Chukchi Plateau close to the Arctic Beaufort Sea. Questioning with this visible experiment the which means of residing and being hooked up to totally different areas, the artist additionally explores notions of belonging, id, nationwide borders and restrictions alongside evolving private relationships. On this sense, his primarily unfinished diagrams, fashions and animations signify a seek for new potentialities for approaching the complexities of emotion and bodily life. Concurrently, the artist may even current a undertaking at Frieze Seoul in collaboration with LG: an homage from Do Ho Suh and his brother Eulho Suh to their father, Suh Se Okay, additionally a famend artist. This has created an intergenerational dialog that reveals important points of how Korean artwork and aesthetics have quickly advanced and remodeled over just some a long time.
Do Ho Suh’s “Speculations” runs by means of November 3
Kyungah Ham and Michael Joo at Kukje Gallery
man, smuggling, bribe, rigidity, nervousness, censorship, ideology, approx. 1400hrs/1 particular person, velvet, rayon, cotton, polyester grosgrain, herringbone grosgrain ribbon tape, adhesive, picket, canvas, aluminum body, 141.7 x 328.4 x 4.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery Picture: Jeon Byung Cheol Picture supplied by Kukje Gallery
Native powerhouse Kukje Gallery will dedicate its Seoul areas to exhibitions showcasing the work of two Korean artists, Kyungah Ham and Michael Joo, who’ve very totally different aesthetics however share an analogous curiosity in investigating the notion of human labor and its relation to expertise. Ham makes use of embroidery and North Korean weaving traditions to delve into social and political points that discover the complexities of the connection between South and North Korea. By utilizing these textiles in her artwork which can be typically made by nameless craftspeople, the artist interrogates notions of originality, authorship and craftsmanship traditions in opposition to the assimilation of commercial mass manufacturing and the accelerated modernization South Korea went by means of in just a few brief a long time. In “Phantom Maps,” Ham focuses on the notion of the “phantom,” a time period that holds vital which means within the artist’s follow, referring to the invisible cues and connections that energy society and represent the phantasm of tradition. On this sense, Ham’s embroideries turn into a receptacle, weaving collectively layers of shared sociopolitical reminiscence, literary references and poetic allusions whereas turning into a medium to attach with the “nameless phantoms” that created them with 1000’s of hours of labor.
In its second area, Kukje is internet hosting “Delicate Abilities and Underground Whispers,” that includes a sequence of minimalist works by Micahel Joo. With a hypnotic visible discipline of crystalline surfaces and important geometries, the artist questions the dynamics of our notion of supplies and objects, pushing our consideration to the liminal hints that contour invisible relations and intimacies with what surrounds us. Taking part in with reflection and refraction, together with the tactility of surfaces and the visible sensations that mild can encourage, these minimal sculptural compositions are the results of an elaborate means of creation that explores a varied vary of methods and instruments, from A.I. to watercolors, stone and glass.
Kyungah Ham’s”Phantom and A Map” and Michael Joo’s “Delicate Abilities and Underground Whispers” run by means of November 3.
Camilla Alberti at MOKA (Hyundai Museum of Youngsters’ Books & Artwork)
Monsters should not at all times dangerous; they will also be seen as alien varieties that assist us to ascertain potentialities of other future lives. Engaged on this notion, the visionary follow of Italian artist Camilla Alberti explores various eventualities of coexistence and collaboration between species, combining each natural and non-organic supplies into new creatures that problem the dominant anthropocentric paradigm. Notably, the works offered on this present are from a pedagogical means of co-creation with native youngsters of 6 to 11 years outdated, who, guided by the artist, realized to remodel pure supplies, akin to mulberry leaves and cellulose, to evoke Dokkaebi, or Korean monsters. Aiming to encourage environmental consciousness, the undertaking integrates conventional Korean mythology into discussions of the ecological disaster, offering a robust cultural instrument to advertise sustainability and respect for the atmosphere. Utilizing Korean fairy tales and legends, the artist, with the curator Sofia Baldi Pighi, created a significant exhibition and built-in workshops that encourage an emotional and non secular connection to environmental points, making them extra related and pressing for a brand new group. On this approach, Dokkaebi not solely assist protect Korea’s non secular and cultural heritage but in addition turn into a way to deal with and clear up as we speak’s environmental challenges.
Camilla Alberti’s “The Spell of Monsters” is on view by means of September 29.
Nicolas Social gathering at Hoam Museum of Artwork
The well-known Swiss artist, who is especially liked in Asia, can have his first solo exhibition in South Korea open in the course of the artwork week on the Hoam Museum of Artwork—one other establishment based and supported by Samsung and linked with the Leeum Museum Of Artwork. Centered on themes of longevity and extinction of nature, civilization and human and non-human species, the exhibition will encompass a number of mesmerizing immersive installations by the artist. Increasing his pictorial universe from the eighty canvases offered on the partitions of the area with 5 pastel murals, Social gathering will take over the museum’s area as in his latest exhibits, encouraging reconnection with nature and tales with works which can be solely amplified by the wealthy pure atmosphere surrounding the museum, the place nature and tradition coexist in shut concord.
Nicolas Social gathering’s “Mud” is on view by means of January 19, 2025.
Rebecca Ackroyd at Peres Initiatives
Following the latest solo exhibitions “Mirror Stage” in Venice and “Interval Drama” on the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, Ackroyd’s second exhibition in Seoul is her fourth with the gallery. Titled “The Social gathering Is A Lady,” the present continues the artist’s analysis into mundane objects that turn into simulacra of experiences of transience, reminiscence, existence and id. Approaching all these themes from a distinctively female perspective, Ackroyd builds up a sequence of uncanny encounters the place essentially the most atypical object or physique element turns into disquieting through an uncommon change of scale or the mechanization of its most grotesque traits. Transferring between dream and hallucination, her eerie but mysterious assemblages and intimidating but sensual pastels query the connection between human and machine and the potential distortions in these interactions. A looming sense of peril, hazard or decay characterizes most of her horny but disquieting works. Intensely psychological, the present follows a unconscious narrative with a sequence of symbolical hints ready to be decoded.
Rebecca Ackroyd’s “The Social gathering Is A Lady” opens on September 4 and runs by means of November 17.
