Lifestyle - The Korea Times

Which galleries are heading to Frieze Seoul 2025?

Once the summer heat fades, September ushers in a season of art in Seoul, headlined by the return of the Frieze Seoul mega fair. Now in its fourth edition, the fair runs from Sept. 3 to 6 at COEX in southern Seoul, bringing together more than 120 galleries from over 30 countries across three sectors: Galleries, Focus Asia and Frieze Masters. As in previous iterations, this year’s lineup boasts a strong showing from across Asia, with a particular focus on exhibitors with physical spaces in Korea, alongside international blue-chip heavyweights like David Zwirner, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery and Spruth Magers. Returning Korean dealers include Arario Gallery, Gallery Baton, Gallery Hyundai, Jason Haam, Johyun Gallery, Gana Art, Kukje Gallery, Hakgojae Gallery, P21, PKM Gallery and Whistle. Among the major players around the region are Shanghai’s Antenna Space, Hong Kong’s Kiang Malingue, Singapore’s STPI, Tokyo’s Take Ninagawa and Manila’s The Drawing Room. This year, five exhibitors are “graduating” from the emerging Focus Asia section to the main Galleries sect

May 30, 2025By Park Han-sol

Which galleries are heading to Frieze Seoul 2025?

Korea opens first public museum for photography in Seoul

Korea’s first public museum devoted to the art and history of photography opened its doors, Thursday, in northern Seoul. While private institutions such as Museum Hanmi and the Goeun Museum of Photography have showcased the visual language of the lens since the early 2000s, the new Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA) in Dobong District is the first state-run institution dedicated solely to the exhibition, research, archiving and preservation of this ever-evolving medium. With its black box-like form and twisting, curved edges, the structure rises four stories above ground and extends two levels below. Inside, it houses four exhibition halls, a photo library, a darkroom and two storage vaults — one for still images and the other for moving pictures. “As a public institution, we aim to study, preserve and put on display both the history of Korean photography and its contemporary expressions with a long-term sense of purpose,” said museum director Han Jung-hee at a press conference held the day before the official opening. “And because we’re able to offer our programs f

May 29, 2025By Park Han-sol

Korea opens first public museum for photography in Seoul

Chagall's color-drenched dreamscape returns to Korea in blockbuster show

“I paint, perhaps, because it takes the place of the words I lack,” wrote Marc Chagall (1887-1985) in 1957, in a letter to French critic Jean Paulhan — a quiet revelation from one of the titans of modern art. The Russian-born French artist’s signature sense of childlike fantasy, rendered in a palette of ripe, saturated colors, has cast its spell across borders for a century. His romantic vista unfurls like a reverie half-remembered: a blotchy medley of embracing couples, blooming bouquets, donkeys, roosters, fiddlers, winged apparitions, fish, mermaids, nymphs, as well as recurring echoes of folklore and Jewish symbolism. Suspended in a gravity-free dreamscape, these motifs rarely appear in their natural hues. Instead, they coalesce in an organically surreal rhythm — artificial in tone, yet inexplicably harmonious. “When Matisse dies,” Picasso once said, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” Korea has been no exception in its enduring fascination with the modern master, as evidenced by the number of retrospectives and exhibitions h

May 27, 2025By Park Han-sol

Chagall's color-drenched dreamscape returns to Korea in blockbuster show

In blinking LED numbers, Tatsuo Miyajima captures life's infinite cycles and unpredictability

At the heart of Tatsuo Miyajima’s art lies a deceptively simple medium: digital LED counters, their numbers blinking in a silent dance. Yet what the Japanese artist conjures from these flickering digits is far more profound, if at times abstruse — a luminous, Buddhist-inflected mediation on time and existence. In his installations, the numbers either count down or shift randomly between 1 and 9 — but never to zero. In Western thought, the digit zero has come to symbolize nothingness, the void. Miyajima rejects that finality. It is through these LED numerals, glowing endlessly in darkened galleries, that he physically envelops visitors in the eternal rhythm of life and death and the great cycle of time. At his latest solo exhibition at Gallery Baton in Seoul, “Folding Cosmos,” the artist continues his spiritual exploration of life and being through two new series of works. It’s noteworthy that both “C.T.C.S. k’in” and “Hundred Changes in Life” incorporate mirrors on their surfaces, reflecting the viewer’s body and drawing them physically into the numeral sequence.

May 24, 2025By Park Han-sol

In blinking LED numbers, Tatsuo Miyajima captures life's infinite cycles and unpredictability

ARKO, Getty partner to promote transnational art history research

Choung Byoung-gug, right, chairperson of the Arts Council Korea, shakes hands with Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), during a joint press conference in Seoul, Thursday. The two institutions signed a partnership to advance transnational art history research ahead of the centennial of video art pioneer Nam June Paik's birth, including a 2026 residency for Korean scholars at the GRI. The institute will provide access to its archives to support studies on Paik's legacy. Further collaboration will be planned through symposiums, exhibitions and publications between Korea and Los Angeles. Yonhap

May 22, 2025By Park Han-sol

ARKO, Getty partner to promote transnational art history research

Adoptee artist brings Korean textile tradition to life in live Seoul performance

Minnesota-based Korean adoptee bojagi artist Dawn Tomlinson recently concluded a 10-day live performance at Kwanhoon 1 Pyung Gallery in the traditional streets of Insa-dong, central Seoul, where she crafted Korean textile art in front of a live audience. Bojagi, a traditional Korean wrapping cloth once used for everyday storage or gift-giving, has evolved into a contemporary art form featured in fashion, interior design and global exhibitions. From May 12 to 21, Tomlinson worked in full view of the public, her process visible through the gallery's large street-facing window. Visitors were also invited to step into the small but welcoming studio to ask questions and engage with the artist as she stitched each day's piece. Each day, Tomlinson completed a small bojagi, and on the final two days, she assembled the individual pieces into a larger patchwork, tying the entire performance together in a single textile work. An award-winning artist currently based in Minnesota, Tomlinson shared that she brought a personal layer to the traditional practice, using bojagi to explore themes of identit

May 22, 2025By Pyo Kyung-min

Adoptee artist brings Korean textile tradition to life in live Seoul performance

InterviewWith hairnets and fast food wrappers, Shin Min's sculptures serve up raw look at reality of service work

“Ew! There’s hair in my food!” It was the kind of shriek that could freeze the air — sharp, accusatory and impossible to ignore. A sound all too familiar to Shin Min, who spent more than a decade clocking in to flip burgers and pour lattes to support herself. When that dreaded cry pierced the air, it became something more than just about a single strand of hair. Behind the counter, it set off a ripple of unease, a flurry of side-eye glances. And soon, the blame game would begin among the crew. Was it you? No, I didn’t prepare that order. Well, we’re all wearing hairnets, aren’t we? Roll the CCTV. We’ll find the culprit. Scenes like these from her day job — thick with exhaustion, tension and surveillance — played on a loop in the back rooms of Shin’s mind. After hours, she gave them form in her art, using the crumpled paper sacks that once contained frozen French fries: sculptures of women laboring in the unforgiving margins of the low-wage service industry, where any toil goes unseen until something goes wrong. These are the figures Shin brings into the sanitized spa

May 20, 2025By Park Han-sol

With hairnets and fast food wrappers, Shin Min's sculptures serve up raw look at reality of service work

Ron Mueck's retrospective sparks membership surge at MMCA

A large-scale exhibition by Australian artist Ron Mueck at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) has driven a significant increase in the museum's membership, the MMCA said Tuesday. Since the exhibition opened April 11, the museum has gained approximately 70,000 new members, and overall visitor numbers to its Seoul branch have surged by 145 percent compared with the same period last year. The artist's first solo exhibition in Asia has drawn a record average of 6,777 daily visitors on weekends and 4,611 on weekdays, with individuals in their 20s and 30s accounting for 73 percent of the total attendance. To date, the exhibition's cumulative audience has surpassed 210,000. The exhibition showcases 24 pieces of artwork, alongside two documentary films. The selection includes some of Mueck's most iconic works, as well as several rarely exhibited internationally. Among them is "Mass," an installation consisting of 100 large-scale resin human skulls. It is displayed vertically for the first time, utilizing the MMCA's unique architecture. Transporting the installation to Kore

May 20, 2025By Yonhap

Ron Mueck's retrospective sparks membership surge at MMCA

Gwangju’s May Art Festival reflects on democracy as a living organism

GWANGJU — As Korea marks the 45th anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, a city once silenced by tanks and tear gas is again alive with color, sound and critical reflection. From May 8 to 29, the annual May Art Festival transforms Gwangju into a living archive of resistance and inspiration. It invites visitors to rethink democracy not simply as a historical achievement but as a fragile, ongoing struggle. This year’s festival, themed “Biodemocracy: Democracy as a Living Thing,” arrives amid deep political turbulence. Since President Yoon Suk Yeol's Dec. 3 martial law declaration, the country has seen months of mass protests. A looming presidential election has further intensified the atmosphere. In this context, the festival becomes more than a cultural event. It is a timely intervention in national conversations about power, justice and collective memory. The concept of biodemocracy — democracy as something organic, vulnerable and alive — frames the festival’s approach. Confronting global authoritarian trends, the climate crisis and deepening economic precarity, many artwor

May 19, 2025By Jack Greenberg

Gwangju’s May Art Festival reflects on democracy as a living organism

60 years of Korean contemporary art debuts in UAE's largest exhibition

A landmark exhibition tracing the arc of Korea’s contemporary art scene, from the 1960s to today, has opened in the United Arab Emirates, marking the largest showcase of its kind ever staged in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. Titled “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits,” the presentation gathers 48 works by 29 Korean artists, all drawn from the Seoul Museum of Art’s (SeMA) collection. On view at Abu Dhabi’s Manarat Al Saadiyat, many of these pieces are being shown in the UAE for the first time. Co-curated by SeMA’s Yeo Kyung-hwan and independent curator Maya El Khalil, the show delves into how Korean artists have harnessed evolving media to mirror — and at times, reimagine — a society in flux, tracing six decades of sweeping social and technological transformation. “Bringing these important works from the Seoul Museum of Art’s collection to Abu Dhabi, we had to consider the context in which they would be encountered, and how this would inherently shape their meaning,” El Khalil said. “Works that may have carried specific cultural resonance in Seoul could

May 19, 2025By Park Han-sol

Arts & Theater