3 fall exhibitions to see in Seoul after September art tide

Lee Jin-ju's "5-Texture" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery

The tidal rush of art that swept through Seoul with the Frieze and Kiaf fairs in early September may have ebbed, but that doesn’t mean the city’s creative scene has gone quiet.

Here are three exhibitions by Korean artists that may offer a chance to catch echoes of that earlier frenzy — this time in quieter, more intimate forms.

‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me’

What threads link the work of Seoul-born artist Lee Kang-seung and American artist Candice Lin?

For Lin, they run along two paths: “One is a reclamation of queer history, often little known or speculative, because it was not recorded. The other is the idea of thinking of an archive as something that lives not only in papers but also in the body itself,” she said at Gallery Hyundai, where the two creatives unveil their first-ever joint show, “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.”

Installation view of "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me," a joint exhibition of artists Lee Kang-seung and Candice Lin at Seoul's Gallery Hyundai / Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai

Through gold-threaded embroidery, assemblages of material fragments and graphite drawings, Lee has long mined the overlooked legacies of modern LGBTQ+ history and AIDS activism. In doing so, he has sketched a new kind of queer genealogy that transcends national borders and generations.

For this exhibition, he turns his gaze to the skin and body as a living archive of memory. This vision comes most vividly to life in his new video installation, “Skin.”

The work centers on the fluid movements of octogenarian queer dancer Meg Harper, whose wrinkled skin and scars are revealed in unflinching close-ups. In these intimate frames, the skin and muscle memory become a visceral record of a life lived.

“I wanted to explore how dancers, who use their bodies as their language, reflect on aging,” the artist explained. “Within the course of aging, I believe an individual’s history seeps into every layer of the skin.”

Lee Kang-seung's "Skin" (2024) / Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai

Meanwhile, Lin has often utilized organic substances — mold, bacteria and fermentation — as her medium to expose the fissures of colonial history, race, gender and sexuality.

In the Seoul show, she trains her lens on the bodies of nonhuman subjects: plants, minerals and animals. Among the most compelling pieces are the edible drawings “Eat Me” and the video “Feline Messages to the World.” In the latter, she adopts a cat’s perspective to probe the fraught bonds humans have forged with the animals they domesticate — relationships where care and domination, violence are inseparably entwined.

“Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me” runs through Oct. 5.

Lee Jin-ju's "Concave Tears-Convex Courage" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery

Lee Jin-ju’s ‘Discontinuouscontinuity’

Lee Jin-ju’s disquieting art never fails to grab you at once.

Through her surreal medley of human and animal forms intertwined with other natural and artificial objects, she conjures a dreamlike world that hovers at the edges of subconscious fear. Every surface is rendered in hyperrealistic detail, with even the finest hair and wrinkle captured, yet the figures themselves resist intimacy: faces are hidden, eyes look away, bodies emerge from a pitch-black void.

Beneath this unsettling imagery runs a quiet emotional current. Though never explicit, Lee’s personal trauma — her brief childhood kidnapping at age 4 — subtly haunts the scene, infusing it with a tension between beauty, eeriness and vulnerability.

Her paintings are thus less about literal narrative than subconscious memory, probing the unseen, the indescribable and the unknowable.

Lee Jin-ju's "Replies" (2025) / Courtesy of Arario Gallery

“Discontinuouscontinuity,” the artist’ new solo exhibition at Arario Gallery, marks the latest chapter of her odyssey through shaped canvases and spatial experimentation.

Among the standouts is the double-sided canvas “Concave Tears–Convex Courage.” Its uncanny scene is quintessentially Lee: pools of festering blood collect amid a snowy landscape, populated by people with their backs turned, pig carcasses, moss-covered rocks and scattered crime-scene evidence markers.

Equally striking is “Replies,” an installation in which 29 paintings of disembodied hands hover in velvety darkness.

“Hands can convey a lot more things than faces. But they’re less direct, leaving more room for interpretation,” she said at the gallery.

“In my work, so many details are rendered with precision, but at the same time, so much else is concealed. In East Asian aesthetics, the very act of concealment can amplify what is revealed.”

Lee approaches her art in much the same way, layering the meticulously visible with the deliberately hidden.

“Discontinuouscontinuity” runs until Oct. 9.

Ok Seung-cheol's "Tylenol" (2025) / Courtesy of Lotte Museum of Art

Ok Seung-cheol’s ‘PROTOTYPE’

With their large, stylized eyes and enigmatic expressions, artist Ok Seung-cheol’s figures feel uncannily familiar, as if summoned from a half-remembered scene in an anime or a video game.

In today’s post-digital visual culture, such faces multiply without end — replicated, recomposed and consumed in infinite variation. Ok turns to these reproducible forms to ask what “originality” might mean in an age when images are no longer tethered to a single, traceable source.

In his art, he pulls these images out of the immaterial digital world and renders them in painting and sculpture, thus giving tangible weight and “uniqueness” to what was once infinitely replicable.

Installation view of Ok Seung-cheol's solo exhibition, "PROTOTYPE," at the Lotte Museum of Art / Courtesy of Lotte Museum of Art

“PROTOTYPE,” his latest survey exhibition at the Lotte Museum of Art in southern Seoul, immerses visitors in this vision. Within softly glowing, mirrored rooms, Ok’s crisply outlined canvases and gigantic 3D-printed sculptures radiate an otherworldly presence.

Granted, the experience feels very much repetitive after several rooms: the nearly same faces reappear again and again, only in different scales and mediums.

Yet, perhaps creating this sense of unwelcome déjà vu is precisely Ok’s goal — placing viewers in a maze of endless reproduction that slowly dulls the senses. His recent painting, “Tylenol,” makes the metaphor explicit, likening the numbing familiarity of recurring images to the body’s diminishing response to a drug after repeated doses.

“PROTOTYPE” runs through Oct. 26.