Kim Jun-geun was a painter active from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. He never achieved the fame of Kim Hong-do or Shin Yun-bok, the two most prominent genre painters of the Joseon period. However, he painted a more diverse range of folk customs. His genre paintings are considered invaluable in that they depict livelihoods, food, clothing, housing, rituals, and games popular among Koreans from a century ago more vividly than the photography that was introduced to Korea in the late nineteenth century.

– National Folk Museum of Korea

Part Two of Gallery Hyundai’s 50th anniversary exhibition, 현대 HYUNDAI 50, highlighting works by artists the gallery has started working with from the mid-1980s to the present. Over seventy works by thirteen foreign artists and sixteen Korean artists who share a part of the gallery’s history will be presented.

– Gallery Hyundai

The exhibition’s title, Bottomless Bag, is taken from the bag appearing in the animated film Inside Out (2015). Filled with the main character’s memories and their associated orbs, along with an assortment of other objects, the film’s imaginary bag was chosen to illustrate the exhibition’s core concepts of ‘memory’ and ‘collection.’

The Korean title of the exhibition references the school supply–filled ‘object bags’ sold to students in Korea during the 1980s and 1990s. Remembering this nostalgic object of the past, the exhibition hopes to examine the times and memories connected by the objects.

In this exhibition, the space itself becomes the designer’s ‘object bag,’ where the images exhibited in the space become the ‘objects’ that evoke past memories and serve as the designer’s tools for a new experiment. The exhibition invites visitors to experience the meaning of those found objects collected and archived by Na Kim inside the museum space.

– SeMA

Various Small Fires is pleased to present, Next of Kin, the exhibition debut of six American artists in Seoul, South Korea. In the unsettling ups and downs of the current COVID-19 crisis, VSF has taken the opportunity this summer to focus on a universal constant: family.

Pushing beyond its biological definition, the artists capture members of their families, chosen tribes, and imagined ancestors in intimate portraits that reflect an unprecedented era of shifting priorities with an insistence on intimacy and tenderness. Essentially under house arrest, Gina Beavers, Diedrick Brackens, Jessie Homer French, Chase Hall, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, and Calida Rawles contemplate the figures at the core of their social disruption.

– VSF Seoul

Deploying the concept of “family” to represent social solidarity, this year’s second-edition exhibition Looking for Another Family presents Asia as a public platform on which to discuss and share diverse issues concerning the Asian territory. In this scheme, the museum serves as an open space for discussion, gathering people of all generations and socioeconomic statuses for artists and audiences to envision “another form of a family”—a fluid platform for empathy and solidarity.

Featured in this exhibition are 15 teams of artists from eight Asian countries—Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—who depart from contemplation on their own identities to explore wider realms of consciousness: their own communities, societies, countries, and eventually, the world. The artists also offer opportunities for viewers to involve themselves in active communication not only through artworks comprising performances, photographs, and videos, but also through workshops in the forms of a snack cart, farming, an investment booth, a music video screening, a newsroom, and a roundtable discussion.

– MMCA

The exhibition features 22 works across multifaceted categories, from sound installation, audience-driven performance, interactive sound installation, light art to visual music by 13 internationally recognized artists and collectives. With this exhibition, D MUSEUM is being reinvented as a new art platform where 13 sound spaces await to elicit awareness, sentiments and memories of individuals. In infinite yet transient aural world the audience will be reintroduced to the sense of hearing and guided into the journey of space, time and sound.

– D Museum

Van de Velde explores the clear yet obscure definition of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, and moreover their intriguing relation. His practice is an outcome of his persistent investigation of those concepts, and narratives constructed by adaptations of them. A critical factor which distinguishes fiction and nonfiction depends on whether an incident actually occurs or not. At this point, another dilemma appears; when an event identical to a certain fiction happens, it can belong to the realm of nonfiction only when there is a witness who watches or records it. “Something we have seen in a movie actually happens”, the catchy headline we often hear from the media, indicates that perhaps reality and fiction have a low threshold between them and these two territories can be easily overlapped any time soon. Thus, fiction, reality and considerable potential of their loose boundary are the key word to understand Van de Velde’s artistic practice.

– Gallery Baton

Presented across four exhibition galleries of the museum, this exhibition introduces new works Car Cinema and In the Shadow of the Pagoda, two site-specific installations that dominate the space with their massive scale and ends with The Cloud(South Korea, North Korea), a sculptural piece reflecting on the theme of the exhibition. Offering a unique viewer experience, the exhibition will also present a selection of Erlich’s earlier works. Highlighting the artist’s distinct sense of humor and brilliant imagination that push the boundaries of reality, Leandro Erlich: Both Sides Now hopes to provide the viewers with a new aesthetic experience representing the forefront of contemporary art.

– SeMA

Perrotin Seoul is pleased to present Claire Tabouret’s exhibition ‘Siblings.’ Started in 2019, Claire Tabouret’s new series of portraits were initiated in a time when gatherings were frequent and interaction encouraged. The artist finished this new body of work in a context that has fundamentally changed, while we are forced into global lockdown by pandemic. Tabouret’s own outlook on her work has evolved, and these portraits serve as a reminder of the power in community and the importance of remaining connected even while we are separated. Her exhibition, Siblings, carries a certain nostalgia made heartrending by the isolation we all experience.

– Perrotin

LOTTE Museum of Art boldly brings to you a special exhibit, presenting a wealth of space-themed artworks centered around Snoopy from Peanuts – the very beagle who accompanied the astronauts on NASA’s Apollo X mission approximately half a century ago. Peanuts, which turns 70 this year, has long been hailed as a contemporary classic due in part to its distinct outlook on the world. Best known for the iconic beagle Snoopy, the legendary comic franchise was originally created by American cartoonist Charles M. Schulz as a series of four-panel comic strips, featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy as the two mainstays along with a gang of young friends. Peanuts ran for 50 years from 1950 to 2000, and was enlisted in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most published comic strip in the world.

– LOTTE MUSEUM

FOR YOU: Jenny Holzer presents texts by Holzer and other authors selected by the artist on posters, a robotic LED display, and stone carvings. Created especially for this project, a new monumental LED artwork, FOR YOU, foregrounds the voices of women, featuring texts in Korean and English by five contemporary writers: Kim Hyesoon, Han Kang, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Svetlana Alexievich and Hawzhin Azeez. Examined together, the work of these authors reflects on diverse accounts of vulnerability and abuse of power, life and death, and the ways gender and sexuality play into violence and oppression. The sculpture resonates with our turbulent era of ongoing wars, terrorism, and violence, and the unforgettable pain of those suffering. Holzer actively engages with and addresses pressing concerns, maximizing her messages in public spaces and emphasizing their urgency and immediacy. MMCA anticipates that this project will inspire you to ask the questions evoked by the texts and listen to the voices resonating within you.

– MMCA

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Billy Childish. The prolific British painter, musician, and writer has produced hundreds of albums of music and dozens of volumes of fiction and poetry. For his sixth exhibition with the gallery, and his first with Lehmann Maupin in Korea, Childish has created a body of work emblematic of his “radical traditionalist” approach. Pulling from themes found throughout art history—a verdant landscape, a sunset, a still life—Childish presents intensely personal vignettes that feel archetypical, vibrating with the kinetic energy of a moment lived.

– Lehmann Maupin

Taking its cue from the complex history of independent and alternative art spaces in Seoul and Gucci’s reflections on eterotopia, the exhibition proposes a new definition of what an “other space” might be: place in which the understanding of otherness comes to life.

The exhibition, curated by Myriam Ben Salah, known for her radical aesthetic vision, formulates a new definition of “being together.”

Using strong visual imagery, imbued with humor and magical realism, the participating artists playfully question the narrow perspectives of our society’s dominant discourses in a way that perfectly chimes with Gucci’s eclectic, contemporary vision.

– Daelim Museum

Embroidered pads, in particular, bore colorful patterns including phoenixes and mandarin ducks as the symbol of harmonious and loving marriage, peonies to wish for wealth and prosperity, and Chinese characters that signify longevity, fortune, and happiness. The beautiful patterns were unfolded on the palm-sized cloths in colorful threads, like brush strokes sliding over a white paper. One can find how the patterns became unique creations, born again each time through the embroiderers’ signature compositions or techniques, and how their shapes also have evolved over generation.

– Space*c, Coreana Art and Culture Complex

< AU MAGASIN DE NOUVEAUTES > is on the hypothesis of imaginative escape from the present by intersecting heterogeneous tempo-spatial axes – modern times and contemporary period – with a motif of early poems by poet and architect Yi Sang (1910-1937). The title of the exhibition has been appropriated from one of the poems with the same title out of his serial poetry titled < Architecture Infinite Cube> (1932) covered in ‘Joseon Geonchuk (Architecture Magazine)’. The poem is known to have been written on the theme of the Mitsukoshi Department Store which was newly built in Gyeongseong, the then capital city of Korea. The poem was an observation of the transforming city of Seoul into a space of capitalism under the colonial rule and its bustling crowd, and an ambivalent reality brought in by the modern civilization through enigmatic codes and a multi-view approach.

– Maison Hermès Dosan Park