Centre Pompidou’s Seoul branch debuts with major Cubism show

Hanwha Foundation of Culture Chairman Lee Sung-soo speaks during a press conference for Centre Pompidou Hanwha's opening in Seoul, Tuesday. Courtesy of Centre Pompidou Hanwha

French Centre Pompidou’s long-awaited Seoul branch will open its doors on June 4 with a sweeping exhibition on Cubism, marking a new chapter in the French institution’s global expansion and the 140th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Korea and France.

Located next to the Han River, Centre Pompidou Hanwha is the latest addition to the French institution's global satellite venues already in France, Spain, Belgium and Shanghai.

At a press preview Tuesday, Hanwha Foundation of Culture Chairman Lee Sung-soo said the museum opening is the result of “several years of preparation” to bring a world-class modern art institution to Seoul.

Visitors look around the exhibition during a press preview at the Pompidou Center Hanwha in Seoul, Tuesday. Yonhap

Marking the 140th anniversary of Korea‑France diplomatic relations, he framed the project as “another major cultural and artistic landmark in Seoul,” adding that the Seoul venue aims to showcase Korean arts on a global stage.

Laurent Le Bon, president of Centre Pompidou, mirrored Lee's view. "This project grows out of a deep Franco-Korean friendship, which now spans 140 years. We are celebrating that anniversary as this magnificent building opens to the public," he said.

Lim Keun-hye, director of exhibitions at the Hanwha Foundation of Culture, said the museum ultimately aims to build a “strategic framework” in which Korean art is introduced through themes that resonate with the Pompidou collection, pairing global masters with emerging Korean artists and using the institution’s international network to help domestic artists gain broader exposure.

The inaugural exhibition, “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision,” runs from June 4 to Oct. 4 across the museum’s two main galleries and brings to Korea 91 works by 43 artists from the Centre Pompidou collection.

Christian Briend, with a microphone, head curator of the modern collections department at Centre Pompidou, speaks during a press preview of the Seoul branch's inaugural exhibition, Tuesday. Courtesy of Centre Pompidou Hanwha

Jointly curated by French and Korean curators, the show traces the movement from its emergence around 1907 through its many offshoots into the 1920s, ultimately presenting 112 works of 54 artists.

Christian Briend, head curator of the modern collections department at Centre Pompidou, said the choice of Cubism was deliberate.

“We have one of the world’s most important collections of Cubist masterpieces, and Cubism itself was born and developed in Paris,” he said, calling it “the first great avant‑garde movement of the 20th century and a visual revolution that broke with traditional perspective, opened the way to abstraction, collage and conceptual art, and shaped the course of modern and contemporary art.”

Visitors can encounter early experiments by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, followed by works by Fernand Léger, Juan Gris and Robert Delaunay, among others, that illustrate international spread and postwar variations of the genre.

"KOREA FOCUS: Map of Dreams toward the Modern Avant-Garde," the Korean section of Centre Pompidou Hanhwa's inaugural exhibition, is seen in this provided photo. Courtesy of Centre Pompidou Hanwha

Mapping Korean modern avant-garde

A key element of the opening show is a mezzanine-level special section titled “KOREA FOCUS: Map of Dreams toward the Modern Avant‑Garde,” which examines how Cubist and broader avant‑garde vocabularies were received and translated in Korean modern and contemporary art.

The section brings together 21 works by 11 Korean artists, including Kim Whanki, Yoo Young-kuk, Park Re-hyun, Lee Soo-auck and Ham Dae-jung, juxtaposing them with European Cubist legacies to highlight both direct influences and independent developments.

Senior curator Cho Ju-hyun of Centre Pompidou Hanwha said the mezzanine section was conceived “to become a kind of bridge” between the two worlds, imagining a space where Korean artists “introduce their own work while encountering Cubist and avant-garde paintings from Paris.”

“Paris was a symbolic destination for Korean artists in the first half of the 20th century, a place of projection and longing,” Cho said. “In ‘Korea Focus,’ we trace how the modern visual language that emerged after Cubism was reimagined through Korean realities and sensibilities.”

The section follows artists who absorbed Cubist structures yet developed their own idioms amid Korea’s turbulent postwar history, grounding fragmented forms in scenes of Korean daily life and inflecting their canvases with distinctly Korean elements, including brushwork that recalls the soft bleed of ink in traditional painting.

By titling the section “A Dream Map Toward the Modern Avant-Garde,” she added, the curatorial team wanted to leave room for multiple readings while creating “an opportunity for Korea’s opening to Cubism and its trajectories to be newly illuminated in the future.”

“The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision” runs from June 4 to Oct. 4.