Explore Seoul Art Week: 7 Unmissable Exhibitions Outside Frieze

Since Frieze expanded into Seoul in 2021, the art world has taken notice, drawing throngs of collectors and enthusiasts alike, especially during the packed Seoul Art Week where Frieze Seoul and KIAF coincide in early September. Beyond the fairgrounds, exhibitions across the city—from galleries to museums—offer a treasure trove of diverse and compelling artwork. Visitors can engage with international voices spanning Switzerland to Argentina and Japan, while also encountering celebrated Korean and senior artists who bring modern South Korean art to the foreground.

Whitewall spotlights several standout shows worth stepping off the beaten path for, “Casper” at Alternative Space LOOP, a powerful reflection on the unnamed victims of war, and Teresita Fernández’s ceramic installation at Lehmann Maupin Seoul, evokes the layered complexity of oceanic landscapes.

“Liquid Horizon”

Lehmann Maupin Seoul

Itaewon

Lehmann Maupin Seoul presents Teresita Fernández’s debut exhibition at the gallery’s Seoul location—and the artist’s first in the city—titled “Liquid Horizon.” The New York–based artist unveils a glazed ceramic wall installation alongside sculptural panels that conjure the physical and metaphorical presence of water. Known for her immersive environments that often merge materiality with perception, Fernández here turns her attention to aquatic landscapes, imagining water as a layered horizon with depths and densities that extend beneath the surface while reflecting the world above. 

The exhibition builds upon her recent New York show, “Soil Horizon,” expanding her exploration of subterranean spaces into the oceanic realm. Rather than treating landscape as fixed terrain, Fernández frames it as a site of psychological, cultural, and elemental weight. “Liquid Horizon” suggests that water, like soil, is an archive of memory and meaning, both ethereal and beyond the limits of human comprehension.

What we Love: The way Fernández transforms ceramics into fluid, wave-life surfaces that appear in motion.

“Liquid Horizon” at Lehmann Maupin Seoul
August 27-October 25, 2025

Tracey Emin, Ethel Adnan, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Irwin, and Antony Gormley

White Cube Seoul

Gangnam

At Frieze Seoul, White Cube presents a striking selection of artworks across sculpture and tapestry. Tracey Emin’s Without Conscience (2014) depicts the lower half of a reclining female figure with outstretched legs, its fragmentary form underscoring themes of vulnerability and imperfection in the human condition. Ethel Adnan’s tapestry Parc en Été (2021) recalls Persian rugs from her childhood, reimagined with bold colors and abstract compositions.

The presentation also includes Isamu Noguchi’s Atomic Haystack, a steel sculpture that juxtaposes the vastness of a haystack with the singularity of an atom, evoking both natural form and the peril of atomic power. Robert Irwin’s fluorescent sculpture #6 x 8’ anchors the booth with glowing light tubes that recalibrate spatial perception, immersing the viewer in a play of light and perspective.

Coinciding with the fair, White Cube also presents Antony Gormley’s first solo project in Seoul. “Inextricable,” staged jointly at White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac, reflects on the fact that more than half of the world’s population lives in urban environments, exploring how the human body is shaped and defined by the structures of the city.

What we Love: Irwin’s glowing sculpture shifts perception in real time.

Tracey Emin, Ethel Adnan, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Irwin, and Antony Gormley at White Cube Seoul
September 2-September 3, 2025

“Condition for holding a natural form” and “Rocking to Infinity”

Kukje Gallery

Jongno

Gala Porras-Kim’s “Condition for holding a natural form” brings together two groups of artworks that question how abstraction and human systems of classification intersect with the organic world. In the front room, she collaborates with nature itself. While museums typically regulate humidity, Porras-Kim embraces it through “signals”: a suspended fabric infused with graphite and a dehumidifier releases and absorbs moisture over time. This process creates shifting patterns on panels laid on the floor, ensuring the installation is in constant flux—no two visits are the same. In the second room, stones collected from Korea, China, and Japan are arranged into unconventional categories such as “extraterrestrial stones” and “sacred stones.” Porras-Kim describes these as “index drawings,” contemporary systems of classification that reframe historical artifacts and open new interpretive possibilities.

Louise Bourgeois’ “Rocking to Infinity” takes inspiration from one of the artist’s own writings, evoking the intimate image of a mother cradling her child. Fabric pieces and artworks on paper wrap the walls, creating an environment filled with recurring motifs of Bourgeois’ later practice: self-portraits, mother-and-child figures, spirals, landscapes, and familial imagery. At the center, three major sculptures anchor the installation, a memorial to her enduring relationship with her longtime assistant.

What we Love: The floor panels shift and evolve, making each encounter unique. 

“Condition for holding a natural form” and “Rocking to Infinity” at Kukje Gallery
September 2-October 26, 2025

“Adrián Villarreal Rojas: The Language of the Enemy”

Art Sonje Center

Jongno

At Art Sonje Center, Adrián Villar Rojas transforms the museum into a sculptural ecosystem. Instead of preservation, the building becomes a site of decomposition, mutation, and inheritance by non-human and inorganic forces. For the artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea, this vast site-specific project occupies all four floors of the museum. Temporary earth mounds block the entrance, pulling the outside world into the sterile interior. Safeguards like humidity and temperature controls are dismantled, erasing boundaries between nature and institution.

The exhibition, “The Language of the Enemy,” was created on-site by a team of eleven who traveled from Argentina to Seoul just six weeks before opening. It also commemorates the museum’s inaugural exhibition thirty years ago, bridging the center’s past with its transformed present.

What we Love: That Rojas takes over every floor and corner of the museum from the corridors and stairwells to the restrooms.

“Adrián Villarreal Rojas: The Language of the Enemy” at Art Sonje Center
September 3, 2025-February 1, 2026

Izumi Kato

Perrotin Seoul

Gangnam

Japanese artist Izumi Kato presented his second solo exhibition at Perrotin Seoul last month. Kato began his career as a painter before expanding into natural materials such as wood and stone. His practice is defined by recurring motifs: humanoid figures with large, exaggerated heads, wide or emphasized eyes, and limbs that taper. What began as two-dimensional figures eventually evolved into three-dimensional sculptures, giving physical presence to his dreamlike beings.

Kato’s draws inspiration from his native Shimane in Japan, where the sea and its creatures have long shaped local life. The humanoid creatures are inspired by human forms, while the marine life—fish, conch shells, and other sea motifs—remain true to their natural origins. These two distinct presences interact within his work, suggesting encounters between humanlike beings and the sea itself. The result is not literal fusion but a supernatural dialogue, rooted in animism, where humans and nature engage as separate yet connected forces. Kato’s artwork suggests a worldview where humans and nature are inseparable, offering an alternative to materialist perspectives.

What we Love: That Kato has titled nearly all his works Untitled since 2000, leaving interpretation entirely open to the viewer.

Izumi Kato at Perrotin Seoul
August 26-October 25, 2025

Kim Tschang-yeul

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korean

Jongno

This marks the first large-scale posthumous retrospective of Kim Tschang-yeul (1929–2021), a seminal figure in Korean contemporary art. The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), continues its commitment to showcasing senior artists, reevaluating their legacies within the broader history of Korean modernism while strengthening the foundation of contemporary art for future generations.

Kim played a leading role in Korea’s art informel movement of the 1950s, a period that fused Western contemporary influences with distinctly Korean sensibilities. After moving to New York in 1965 and later settling in Paris in 1969, Kim developed his singular style in dialogue with the cultural and political shifts of the time. The exhibition unfolds across four sections: Scar, Phenomenon, Waterdrops, and Recurrence. Scar traces Kim’s formative years, shaped by displacement during the Korean War. Phenomenon highlights his New York and Paris period, where the first motifs of waterdrops began to appear. Waterdrops presents the culmination of his iconic paintings, pieces that became synonymous with his name. Finally, Recurrence examines his Thousand Character Class series, meditations on language, order, and the cosmos.

What we Love: The exhibition catalog includes interviews and essays by the artist’s family, offering an intimate glimpse into Kim’s life beyond the canvas.

Kim Tschang-yeul at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korean 
August 22-December 21, 2025

“in beauty bright”

Gladstone Gallery

Gangnam

Thirteen landscapes of varying sizes line the walls of Gladstone Gallery. These watercolors on canvas share a uniform composition and a palette of five pastel shades—pink, blue, yellow, purple, and green—yet each canvas arranges the colors differently. With only four lines used to outline mountains, the simplicity of form contrasts sharply with the gallery’s grey walls, making the canvases appear luminous. The palette draws from colors associated with babies and childhood, coinciding with the birth of the artist’s child.

Ugo Rondinone’s awareness of mortality, shaped by the AIDS crisis of 1989, resonates throughout the series. Each painting is titled by its date of completion, marking time as an essential element. For Rondinone, every canvas embodies life as the marriage of space and time. Born near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, it is no wonder that nature plays a central role in his practice, where landscape and culture carry equal weight.

What we Love: The exhibition title borrows from William Blake’s lullaby “A Cradle Song,” adding a poetic layer to Rondinone’s meditations on time, life, and memory.

“in beauty bright” at Gladstone Gallery
August 29-October 18, 2025

“Casper”

Alternative Space LOOP

Mapo

Lijung’s “Casper” follows two previous exhibitions—“Korean Ghost” and “Kishin: The Generation of Postmemory”—that examined modern Korean history from the Korean War to the democratization movement. This new chapter continues the artist’s postmemory series, tracing her maternal grandfather’s life after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, when he became involved with a far-right anti-communist paramilitary group. His physical traces have disappeared, surviving only through oral histories and archival fragments. This exhibition reanimates his journey, confronting the silence and resilience embedded in generational memory.

The show brings together four artworks: Ghost Without a Grave, a digital cemetery for the nameless dead; Unseen Narrative, an image-archive mapping landscapes and historical backdrops; Casper, a four-channel video installation; and Fragments of Memory, a filmed interview with Lijung’s mother. Together, they confront the void of the forgotten, encouraging viewers to engage with fragile traces through care and imagination rather than attempting to restore history outright.

What we Love: The exhibition resonates beyond Korea, reflecting universal experiences of intergenerational trauma and inviting audiences to reframe their own family histories through processes of healing and remembrance.

“Casper” at Alternative Space LOOP 
August 22–October 1, 2025