Seoul Museum of Art to expand network to 8 branches, renovate main site

A facade of the Seoul Museum of Art's main Seosomun branch in central Seoul / Newsis

With its newest branch set to open this March in western Seoul, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) will complete its transformation into a network of eight museums and art-focused platforms spread across the capital.

Since first opening in 1988, SeMA has steadily expanded beyond its original home, establishing satellite venues to broaden public access to contemporary art. Today, that growing ecosystem includes Buk SeMA, Nam SeMA, Art Archives SeMA and Photography SeMA.

The latest addition — the Seo SeMA in Geumcheon District — is the city’s first public institution devoted to media art. Among the exhibitions inaugurating the new venue is a solo show by rising media artist Kim Hee-cheon, whose work probes the fault lines of reality by testing the boundaries between the virtual and the physical.

“This year marks a pivotal turning point, as SeMA’s eight-branch system is finally complete,” said its general director Choi Eun-ju at a press conference, Tuesday. “Grounded in the distinct identity of each space, the museum will operate as an interconnected and organic network.”

Choi Eun-ju, the general director of the Seoul Museum of Art, speaks at a New Year's press conference at the museum's main Seosomun branch, Tuesday. Yonhap

Also announced on this day were detailed plans for a large-scale renovation of SeMA’s main Seosomun branch, a long-delayed project now scheduled for completion in 2030.

The museum’s flagship site relocated to its current home near Deoksu Palace in 2002, taking over a building that once served as the Supreme Court.

The renovation will overhaul the aging structure — save for its facade, a state-registered cultural property — and add two underground levels totaling 3,300 square meters to create more capacious exhibition galleries, storage facilities and visitor amenities.

In addition, a new main entrance is set to be built along the wall opposite to Deoksu Palace’s stone walkway, offering direct access from the street. The total budget for the project stands at 79.2 billion won, and exhibitions will continue uninterrupted throughout all stages of the renovation.

Yoo Young-kuk's "Work" (1967) / Courtesy of Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation

2026 lineup

SeMA also introduced a series of exhibitions to headline this year.

Foremost among them is the largest-ever retrospective of Yoo Young-kuk, marking the 110th anniversary of the painter’s birth. A pioneer of Korean abstraction, Yoo is celebrated for distilling the country’s natural landscapes into elemental compositions of dots, lines, planes and color. The May show offers an in-depth look at his artistic trajectory and features works seldom seen in public.

"Spain. Benidorm. Autoportrait" by Martin Parr / Courtesy of Martin Parr Collection

Another highlight arrives in November with a solo show by Lee Seul-gi, the winner of the 2020 Korea Artist Prize. Drawing on the forms and symbols of traditional Korean aesthetics, she translates them into the physical vocabulary of contemporary art, including architectural installations.

Several international exhibitions are in the works as well. Among them are Asia’s first solo museum presentations of American multimedia artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and acclaimed English photographer Martin Parr.

Leeson is an early pioneer of artificial intelligence and interactive video, using her work to explore surveillance and human-machine relations.

Parr’s show will be particularly notable, unveiling for the first time photographs he took in the early 2000s that capture scenes from both North and South Korea.