Great Museum Shows to See in Seoul During Frieze Week 2025

Mark Bradford: ‘Keep Walking’ | Amorepacific Museum of Art | 7 August 2025 – 4 January 2026

Mark Bradford brings the fabric of the city into the gallery and takes the process of his art out into the belly of the city. The Los Angeles artist represented the USA at the 2017 Venice Biennale and has had major solo exhibitions at Tate, the Whitney Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art; this is his first in Korea. ‘Keep Walking’, features 20 works from the last 20 years including paintings, sculptures, installations and videos. Bradford’s themes – race, gender, economic inequality, the Black experience, oppression and displacement – are threaded through works such as room-sized abscess Spoiled Foot (2017), AIDS-confronting multimedia installation Pinocchio Is on Fire (2010/2015) and walkable floor painting Float (2019/2024). Bradford’s work has taken on a fresh urgency. He created the work Life Size at the first Frieze Los Angeles in 2019 and this billboard-sized image of a police body camera has since attained an additional and chilling political presience. 

‘Title Match’: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries vs. Hong Jin-hwon | SeMA BukSeoul | August 14 – November 2 2025

In the museum’s annual ‘Title Match’ series, two significant Korean artists square-off over questions of political ‘action’ in an unreliable and overwhelming media sphere. For this bout, those in the ring are web artists Young-Hye Chang Heavy Industries, who have documented the ebb and flow of internet art and information for the past 25 years through video and text pieces, and Hong Jin-hwon, whose work looks at the implicit power dynamics in photography and digital images, often through quasi-informative sloganeering (‘Stay home, save lives!’). Too close to call.

Bae Yoon Hwan: ‘Deep Diver’ | Space K | 14 August – 9 Novemeber 2025

One of the exponents of the aforementioned ‘figuration impulse’, Bae Yoon Hwan explores both personal and global issues in his work, which features paintings, drawings, installations and videos. Not afraid to tackle dark subjects – fracturing of communities, disasters, war – often through allegory, Bae takes a natural next step with his solo exhibition ‘Deep Diver’, which is mainly black. Explaining that ‘this darkness is not a void, but a space of profound contemplation’, Bae forsakes colour to draw the gaze inwards in self-reflection, akin to the depths plumbed by a diver.

Haegue Yang: ‘Lean Leap Days’ | Toto Building | 15 August – 7 September 2025

An intriguing – and intriguingly brief – temporary exhibition, ‘Lean Leap Days’ will be on show in Haegue Yang’s former studio in Jingo. Spinning off her major 2024 show ‘Leap Year’ at London’s Hayward Gallery, and centered on the ‘Mesmerizing Mesh’ works that she introduced in 2021, it will feature publications and some small new sculptures. The ‘Mesmerizing Mesh’ series concerns Yang’s interest in traditions and rituals across cultures, and has a particular focus on different uses of paper. Korean hanji paper is still used in everyday life, as well as appearing in indigenous shamanistic and folk practices: ‘Lean Leap Days’ uses the studio – itself a site of shamanic transformation – as a kind of 3D hanji work, with its multiple compressed layers of memory and creation.

Toto Building 3F, 187 Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul

‘Figuration Circuits’ | Ilmin Museum | 22 August – 26 October 2025

Between 1978 and 2005, Korea’s annual Dong-A Ilbo Art Exhibition offered prizes to emerging artists  across categories including crafts, calligraphy, photography and seal-engraving, as well as painting and sculpture. ‘Figuration Circuits’ takes this rather staid and conservative concept as a point from which to explore the ‘impulse to figuration’ – the cyclical interest in contemporary realism in Korean art. Once a reaction to conceptualism’s lack of cultural specificity, the ‘impulse to figuration’ has reappeared in Korean painting in the 21st century as a response to the proliferation of digital images and the disassociative threat of AI. 

‘Panorama’ | Songeun | 22 August – 16 October 2025 

This lively survey of work by the jury-selected Korean Artists Today (KAT) programme provides an overview of the country’s contemporary art landscape. Diverse in both media and subject material, ‘Panorama’ touches on global themes that impact Korean culture, including migration, virtual reality and social anxiety, and features artists who engage with the fabric of urban life, such as 2024 Frieze Artist Award winner Goen Choi, and others who take a more conceptual approach: Minae Kim, whose sculptures probe social withdrawal, or Onejoon Che, who constructs imagined narratives of cultural exchange between African and Asian youth. Also, look out for redoubtable ‘visual research band’ ikkibawiKrrr channelling Mireuk, a spiritual figure who transcends time and space in the building’s famous subterranean void.

13th Seoul Media City Biennale: ‘Séance: Technology of the Spirit’ | SeMA | 26 August – 23 November 2025

Presented as an alternative response to contemporary anxieties, ‘Séance: Technology of the Spirit’ focuses on the importance of mystical and spiritual experience on modern and contemporary art. Curated by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis, it spans 49 artists from the 19th century to the present day, including Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, and experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Jordan Belson. Keeping it current, the curators say, ‘Many artists have in recent years gravitated towards ways of understanding the world that might offer an alternative to the prevailing systems, which seem at present to be in crisis.’ The biennial will take place at venues across the city, with new commissions and a film and performance programme.

Kimsooja: ‘To Breathe – Sunhyewon’ | Podo Museum pop-up, Sunhyewon | 3 September – 19 October 2025 

Renowned Korean conceptual artist Kimsooja is taking over Sunhyewon, a traditional Seoul hanok house with site-specific installation ‘To Breathe – Sunhyewon’. The work is a companion piece to her exhibition in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, ‘To Breathe – Mokum’ (until 9 November), with both featuring her signature motif of bottari – bundles of clothing donated by local residents which refer to traditional Korean cloth wrappings and represent states of flux and travel, arrival and departure: visual signifiers for what people carry with them. ‘I would like to create works that are like water and air,’ says Kimsooja, ‘which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone.’ Born in Daegu, Kimsooja has had solo shows at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and Guggenheim Bilbao, and represented South Korea at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, so this is a rare chance to see her work in such an intimate space.

Lee Bul: ‘From 1998 to Now’ | Leeum Museum | September 4, 2025 – January 4, 2026 

A homecoming show for a towering figure in Korean art, this is the first iteration of an international tour that will be the most comprehensive survey of Lee Bul’s work yet staged. Since the 1990s, Lee has applied her vision across sculpture, installation, performance and painting, a pioneering artist in her examination of cyborg identity and ideas of the ‘posthuman’. This exhibition, jointly planned by Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art and M+ Museum Hong Kong, will cover all aspects of Lee’s work – technology, utopian modernity, and humanity’s progressive aspirations and failures.

Adrián Villar Rojas: ‘The Language of the Enemy’ | Art Sonje Center | 3 September 2025 – 8 February 2026

Born in Argentina, Adrián Villar Rojas works as a nomadic artist, his large-scale, site-specific projects responding directly to the history and associations of their locations. For his first show in Korea, Rojas is intervening in the architecture of Art Sonje Center, using it as a ‘sculptural body’, and inviting visitors to understand the space and their role within it in a new and unfamiliar way. Rojas has previously applied his process to (among many others) London’s Serpentine Galleries, New York’s High Line, LA MoCA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marian Goodman Gallery, Kurimanzutto and MoMA PS1, so this should be unmissable.

Further Information

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^{Main image: Lee Bul, Willing to Be Vulnerable, 2015–2016. Fabric, metalized film, transparent film, polyurethane ink, fog machine, LED lighting, electronic wiring, dimensions variable. Installation view of ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’, the 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016. © Lee Bul, courtesy of the artist. Photo: Algirdas Bakas}