Lifestyle - The Korea Times

From cosmos to erasure, late Korean masters revisited at global galleries

As 2026 begins, a string of international blue-chip galleries are turning their Seoul spaces over to late Korean masters. One exhibition stages a quiet, transnational conversation between artists shaped by exile; another turns its gaze to the final decade of a painter’s life. Together, these shows linger on masters whose legacies continue to unfold well beyond their lifetimes. Exile and cosmos: Rhee Seundja, Etel Adnan at White Cube Seoul At White Cube Seoul, a dialogue takes shape between two late women artists — Korea's Rhee Seundja (1918-2009) and Lebanese American Etel Adnan (1925-2021). Born 5,000 miles apart, both gravitated toward Paris, where they forged their respective languages of abstraction. Titled “To meet the sun,” the exhibition gathers their paintings and tapestries, tracing an encounter between practices shaped by displacement. Rhee’s move to France during the upheaval of the 1950-53 Korean War marked a decisive turning point. Separated from her three young sons, she arrived in Paris confronting both personal loss and the male-dominated terrain of postwar abstr

Feb 13, 2026By Park Han-sol

From cosmos to erasure, late Korean masters revisited at global galleries

BLACKPINK teams up with National Museum of Korea to launch new EP 'DEADLINE'

K-pop girl group BLACKPINK is expanding its upcoming album rollout beyond music, launching a collaborative project with the National Museum of Korea (NMK) that blends the band's global influence with Korean cultural heritage. According to the museum and the group's label, YG Entertainment, the “National Museum of Korea X BLACKPINK” initiative will run from Feb. 27 to March 8 to coincide with the release of the group’s third EP, “DEADLINE.” The project marks the first time a K-pop act has undertaken a large-scale collaboration with the state-run museum, with global audio streaming platform Spotify joining as an official partner. As part of the event, the museum's exterior and outdoor plaza will be illuminated in pink lighting — the group's signature color — daily from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., offering a nighttime viewing experience for the public. Inside the museum, a dedicated listening zone will be installed along a “Path to History,” located in the east wing of the museum, allowing visitors to hear the full album starting on Feb. 27 at 2 p.m., the moment of its official re

Feb 12, 2026By Pyo Kyung-min

BLACKPINK teams up with National Museum of Korea to launch new EP 'DEADLINE'

Christine Sun Kim to turn sign language into animation at MMCA Seoul

Korean American artist Christine Sun Kim has been selected as this year’s invited creator for “MMCA X LG OLED,” an exhibition series launched by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), in partnership with LG Electronics. Introduced last year, the annual initiative highlights contemporary visual experiments that push and expand the language of media in today’s ever-evolving digital landscape. Each edition invites one artist or collective to produce a large-scale, site-specific installation for Seoul Box, MMCA Seoul’s open exhibition space defined by its 14-meter-high ceilings. Drawing on her lived experience as a Deaf artist navigating a hearing-centered world, Kim explores sound not as a purely acoustic phenomenon but as a socially constructed system shaped by power and access. Working through the body, American Sign Language (ASL) and graphic notation, she reveals how meaning is transmitted and often distorted across different systems of communication. For her Seoul Box presentation, the artist is set to unveil a large-scale animated video installati

Feb 12, 2026By Park Han-sol

Christine Sun Kim to turn sign language into animation at MMCA Seoul

What happens when art refuses to be timeless?

What happens when art refuses to obey its most basic promise: to endure? At the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul, an exhibition turns that question inside out, finding poetry not in permanence but in decay. It comes with a rather evocative title, “Sak-da: The Poetics of Decomposition.” “Sak-da” is a layered Korean verb. Depending on context, it can mean “to rot” or “to lose vitality.” But it can also describe fermentation, a process which does not destroy, but transforms, producing new flavors and aromas. That dual meaning runs through the show, binding together more than 50 works by 15 artists and collectives. The materials here are restless. They rot, dry out, sprout and gather mold. Sometimes, they fall apart entirely — conditions museums typically try very hard to prevent. Traditionally, the museum has cast itself as a guardian of the timeless: a place that preserves objects in their most ideal conditions, so they may be passed down intact to future generations. “Sak-da” deliberately pushes against that mandate. Here, decay is not a fla

Feb 11, 2026By Park Han-sol

What happens when art refuses to be timeless?

Unexpected parallels between Gwon Osang's photo-sculptures, AI

The sculptures of Gwon Osang have a signature look, one that can be recognized instantly. His best-known series, “Deodorant Type,” rejects the weight of traditional materials like stone or bronze. Instead, the 52-year-old artist conjures figures — human bodies, animals and everyday objects — out of thousands of photographic fragments captured from every conceivable angle. These images are cut, collaged and layered over a hardened Styrofoam armature, creating surfaces that appear solid from afar but, up close, unravel into a dense mosaic of images. The result hovers between the eerily lifelike and the overtly constructed. It is from this image-driven method that the exhibition, “Gwon Osang’s Simplexity: AI, Human and Art,” draws an unexpected parallel between his practice and artificial intelligence (AI). To be clear, Gwon himself does not use AI as a tool or a theme in his oeuvre. Yet the show, hosted by LG U+ and organized by The Trinity, identifies a shared underlying logic. The artist’s process of dismantling countless 2D photographs and reassembling them into one 3D

Feb 8, 2026By Park Han-sol

Unexpected parallels between Gwon Osang's photo-sculptures, AI

Arts Council Korea calls for applications for Seoul art residency

The Arts Council Korea (ARKO) is currently accepting applications for its visual artists residency program in Seoul for this year. Launched last year to support artistic creation and promote exchange between Korean and international artists, the ARKO Art Studio will host 10 artists — six international artists and four local. Applicants with at least five years of creative experience are eligible to apply, including international artists currently residing in Korea. Selected artists will be provided with private studio space in Seoul’s Pyeongchang-dong and will be invited to participate in Korean cultural tours, a matching program with local curators or columnists, a mentorship program and networking events. ARKO will also arrange studio visits by curators from Korean and international galleries. At the end of the residency, participants will take part in a two-month group exhibition at the ARKO Art Center in downtown Seoul. The program will run in two rounds — the first runs from March through July, while the second takes place from August to December. Applicants may choose the res

Feb 6, 2026By Kim Se-jeong

Arts Council Korea calls for applications for Seoul art residency

Venice Architecture Biennale's Korean Pavilion returns to Seoul

The Korean Pavilion from the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale has returned to Seoul to share its record-breaking success with local audiences. The homecoming exhibition, titled "Little Toad, Little Toad: Unbuilding Pavilion," opened at the ARKO Art Center in Seoul on Friday and runs through April 5. The exhibition showcases a highly successful seven-month run in Italy last year, where the pavilion welcomed 174,230 visitors, the highest attendance in the history of the Korean Pavilion at the architecture biennale. "The 2025 Korean Pavilion saw massive interest from the global public," Chung Dah-young, the artistic director of the exhibition, said during a press conference Thursday. "About 55.2 percent of the total visitors to the Venice Biennale visited our pavilion, which is the best performance we have ever achieved for an architectural exhibition." The exhibition explores the architecture of the Korean Pavilion itself as it celebrates its 30th anniversary. The exhibition uses a traditional Korean children's song about a toad to describe the pavilion. Whi

Feb 6, 2026By Baek Byung-yeul

Venice Architecture Biennale's Korean Pavilion returns to Seoul

InterviewThe rebel returns: Lee Kun-yong and art of letting body speak

The pairing of slicked-back white hair and a childlike grin has rarely suited anyone as well as it does Lee Kun-yong. On a wintry January afternoon, the 83-year-old sat in the living room of his Seoul home, leafing through memories that stretched back more than half a century. Our meeting came just a week before the opening of his latest solo exhibition at Pace Gallery Seoul, “Body as Thought,” a show intended to gather key archival traces from his 50-year career at the frontier of Korea’s avant-garde experimental art. But Lee, like all good storytellers, was never content to stay on a single subject. The whole conversation unfolded as if a floodgate of stories had been thrown open. Names and scenes from decades past surfaced with startling clarity and before we realized it, two hours had slipped by. That habit of refusing the obvious has shaped Lee’s path from early on. In 1963, during the entrance exam for Hongik University’s art school, one of Korea’s most prestigious programs, applicants were instructed to sketch a plaster cast of Apollo. Everyone rushed to secure a seat

Feb 3, 2026By Park Han-sol

The rebel returns: Lee Kun-yong and art of letting body speak

'Dansaekhwa' master Chung Sang-hwa dies at 93

Chung Sang-hwa, a towering figure in Korean modern art whose meticulously built and cracked monochrome surfaces turned the flat canvas into a signature grid, died Wednesday morning after a prolonged illness. He was 93. Over a career that stretched from the upheaval of the 1950-53 Korean War to the international rediscovery of “dansaekhwa” (monochrome painting) in the 21st century, Chung pursued a single question with near-ascetic focus: how to push the two-dimensional plane beyond its limits without ever fully abandoning it. He found his answer not in an image, but in a method — a cycle of “peeling off” and “filling in,” which demanded both physical endurance and what he himself described as “foolishly endless repetition.” “Performing the same action over and over again to the point of absurdity, that’s what defines my work,” the painter said during his 2023 solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul. Born in 1932 in Yeongdeok, North Gyeongsang Province, Chung entered the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University in 1953, despite opposition from his famil

Jan 28, 2026By Park Han-sol

'Dansaekhwa' master Chung Sang-hwa dies at 93

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

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.” Also a