Life, death and diamonds: Damien Hirst debuts 1st Asia solo show at MMCA Seoul

British artist Damien Hirst poses inside his studio installation displayed as part of his solo exhibition, “There is No Truth but Everything is Possible,” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

Damien Hirst’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Asia has opened at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, bringing the polarizing British artist’s signature explorations of life, death and belief to Korean audiences at a moment of intense debate over his relevance.

Titled “Damien Hirst: Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible,” the show is part of MMCA’s ongoing drive to introduce major figures of global contemporary art to the public and runs through June 28. It gathers some 50 works spanning four decades, from rarely seen early experiments to the controversial animal vitrines and recent paintings that continue to divide critics.

MMCA officials acknowledged that choosing Hirst — a central figure of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement and a lightning rod for criticism over commercialization and spectacle — is a deliberate, even risky, move for a national museum.

Yet, showing how Hirst persistently probes humanity’s bond with death, our drive to escape it, the money that exploits that urge and the systems that cloak such forces in science and progress is “among the strongest curatorial decisions the museum can make for both Korean visitors and this institution,” curators said, arguing its timeliness in Korea in 2026.

Damien Hirst poses with his works “For the Love of God," front, and “Reflecting on the Infinite Power and Glory of God” during a preview of his solo exhibition, “There is No Truth but Everything is Possible,” at the MMCA in Seoul, Wednesday. Newsis

Born in Bristol in 1965 and raised in Leeds, Hirst spent a rebellious youth before finding drawing as his “only escape.” He later moved to London and enrolled at Goldsmiths in 1986.

At 23, he organized the student exhibition “Freeze” in a derelict dockside warehouse, a now-legendary show that helped launch the YBAs and helped revive British contemporary art on the global stage. Meanwhile, critics at home and abroad have argued that his once-radical edge has dulled and his cultural relevance has faded in recent years.

The exhibition’s first section, “With Every Question Comes a Doubt,” focuses on his early 20s, when Hirst began to forge his artistic language.

It opens with “With Dead Head,” a photograph taken when he was 16 in a mortuary, where the artist grins beside a severed head — an image later printed for his first solo show that signals death as the core of his oeuvre. Collage works born from frustration with painting, early Spot Paintings that reveal his love of color and initial Spin Paintings created on a rotating disc trace both his lifelong preoccupation with mortality and his search for form.

The second section, “We Live in Time,” presents monumental glass vitrines, including “A Thousand Years” (1990), with a cow’s head, fly larvae and an electric insect-o-cutor that lay bare the cycle of life and death.

Damien Hirst poses in front of his iconic work, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," during a preview of his solo exhibition “There Is No Truth, But Everything Is Possible,” at the MMCA in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

Nearby, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991) — a large shark suspended in a formaldehyde-filled tank — appears in Korea for the first time, on loan from a New York collector after earlier displays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.

“The Luxury of Silence,” the third section, delves into the shifting relationship among science, religion and capital through medicine cabinet installations and pill works that reflect what curators called humanity’s “blind faith in medicine and the obsessive desire to control fate.”

At its heart is “For the Love of God” (2007), a platinum cast of a human skull set with 8,501 diamonds, which MMCA curators described as paradoxically revealing that “even within eternity, there is an end.”

Butterfly triptychs such as “Contemplating the Infinite Power and the Glory of God” (2008) and dissected religious and mythological sculptures including “Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain” (2007), and the half-flayed unicorn “Myth” (2010) extend his dissection of belief and beauty.

What sets this exhibition apart, museum officials stressed, is its final section in MMCA Studio, which recreates Hirst’s Thames-side London workspace for the first time.

Several previously unseen “River Paintings,” some still unfinished, were shipped directly from his studio, where he continues to work surrounded by collected objects, tools and music. The artist even added pink paint to one canvas and scrawled “I love Korea” on a mirror on the last night of the installation before the press preview.

Damien Hirst’s handwritten message on a mirror in Korean reads "I love you Korea" at his recreated studio during a preview of his solo exhibition “There Is No Truth, But Everything Is Possible,” at the MMCA in Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin

Hirst remains “a very ‘love-or-hate’ artist, and he enjoys that,” a senior MMCA curator said, acknowledging the global criticism that his recent projects have drawn. “But he is still a ‘current’ artist. We expect a lot of debate, and we welcome it. We just hope visitors will feel the power of the originals and make up their own minds.”

“Damien Hirst: Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible” runs from Friday through June 28 at MMCA Seoul.