Six Must-See Exhibitions over Seoul Art Week
Exhibition view: Zadie Xa, Nine Tailed Tall Tales: Trickster, Mongrel, Beast, Space K Seoul (13 July–12 October 2023). Courtesy Space K.
Seoul's galleries and institutions continue to march on with a non-stop stream of programmes across Korea's capital city. Ocula Magazine shares a selection of six must-see exhibitions during Frieze Seoul (6–9 September 2023) and Kiaf Seoul (7–10 September 2023).
Zadie Xa: Nine Tailed Tall Tales: Trickster, Mongrel, Beast
Space K Seoul, 32, Magokjungang 8-ro, Gangseo-gu
13 July–12 October 2023
Expect: an enthralling journey into Zadie Xa's realm of spirits and deities, including a maze of fantastical creatures and monthly yoga sessions.
In her Seoul solo debut, Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa is showing more than 30 new paintings, sculptures, textiles, and installations inspired by Korean folklore.
The motif of the Korean shaman recurs throughout the exhibition. Often acting as an intermediary between the living and dead, for Xa, the figure also represents a conduit through which to explore diasporic experiences and familial legacies. 'Coming from a diasporic position,' she told Ocula Magazine in 2020, 'one feels constantly in-between.'
Nine Tailed Tall Tales is also an ode to the tricksters and beasts in Korean folktales, who are often subjects of retribution or misogyny. Xa portrays them with an air of majestic mystery, as seen in her paintings of half-women, half-animal figures such as Future Selves (2023), or the monumental triptych Trickster, Mongrel, Beast (2023), which depicts a moonlit gathering of hybridised animal forms.
The Space K show adds to an already busy year for Xa, who earlier this year wrapped up a group exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul and a major solo presentation at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Xa also joined Thaddaeus Ropac's roster in March.
Haegue Yang: Latent Dwelling
Kukje Gallery Hanok, 54, Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu
30 August–8 October 2023
Expect: multisensory sculptures variously dressed in fur, artificial flowers, bells, cords, and lightbulbs.
In 2022, Kukje Gallery completed the renovation of a former hanok or traditional Korean house into an exhibition space, making it the latest addition to the gallery's three existing spaces in central Seoul.
Haegue Yang, whose solo exhibition Mesmerizing Mesh (30 August–30 October 2022) inaugurated the space, returns to the Hanok with a new show approaching the site as one in hibernation—a 'latent dwelling'.
The result is an experiment in presenting exhibitions beyond the traditional white cube, with sculptures reclining on the floor as though asleep in one room, or densely packed into another like a storage. As the house goes into hibernation, so do the dwellers within.
Highlights include Totem Robot (2010)—a clothing rack covered with cables, cords, and lightbulbs—and kinetic wall sculptures from the 'Sonic Rotating Whatever Running on Hemisphere' series (2022), where ball bearings and stainless-steel bells jingle as they rotate. The bell is a recurring motif in Yang's work, adding movement and sound to her sculptures. As the artist told Ocula Magazine, bells also '[endow] a life-giving and communicative quality to robot-like and rigid figures.'
Running concurrently to Latent Dwelling at Kukje Gallery is a solo exhibition of Anish Kapoor in the nearby spaces K1, K2, and K3.
Kiyan Williams: Between Starshine and Clay
Peres Projects, 37, Yulgok-ro 1-gil, Jongno-gu
7 September–12 November 2023
Expect: Kiyan Williams' floating, fragmented sculpture revisiting notions of the human form.
A five-minute walk from Kukje Gallery, Peres Projects' recently expanded Seoul space is showing sculptures by Kiyan Williams. The artist, who graduated with an MFA from Columbia University in 2019, has steadily built a material language with soil. This is illustrated in works such as Meditation on the Making of America (2019), a map of the U.S. that began by hurling soil at the canvas; Notes on Digging (2020), a short film on connecting with the earth; and Ruins of Empire (2022), a reimagined Statue of Freedom in hardened soil.
In their first solo presentation in Seoul, Williams transforms the gallery into an otherworldly environment, submerging it in a deep, orange light. The centrepiece, titled Between Starshine and Clay (2022), consists of a cluster of earth and sandstone pieces suspended from a metal grille.
A few components resembling a human face and hands hint at the fact that these may once have formed a larger whole together, and that is indeed the case. The original sculpture was cast from the artist's body, but has since been dismantled beyond recognition, rejecting binary definitions of form.
Running concurrently to Between Starshine and Clay at Peres Projects is Paolo Salvador's solo exhibition, titled Misterios inscritos en tela.
Sung Neung Kyung: Botched Art: The Meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung
Gallery Hyundai, 14 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu
23 August–8 October 2023
Expect: a major gathering of nearly five decades of conceptual art by first-generation Korean performance artist Sung Neung-Kyung.
In the 1970s, Sung Neung Kyung was among the first Korean artists to engage with performance and conceptual art, joining the avantgarde art group ST (Space and Time) and experimenting with visionary works that probed the meaning of the ordinary in a time of political and social uncertainty.
Sung's deviation from Abstraction and Minjung art—arguably the two most influential schools in modern Korean art history—has meant that his work was often sidelined in the Korean art world, though this has been changing in the past decade.
On view at Gallery Hyundai, near Peres Projects, is a major solo exhibition with 140 works including the iconic Contraction and Expansion (1976), a series of gelatin silver prints documenting the artist stretching and bending his body. It is a simple bodily act that, perceived as a metaphor for power, conveys an uneasy undertone about suppressors and the suppressed.
Sung's work is also due to appear in the group exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1 September 2023–7 January 2024). Sung is also staging a participatory performance titled Reading Newspapers in Lightroom Seoul (103 Arisuro 61-gil, Gangdong-gu) on 6 September.
Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different
Arario Gallery, 85, Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu
1 September–21 October 2023
Expect: engrossing animations, paintings, and mural performances that seduce spectators and unfold stories full of ups, downs, and contradictions.
Nalini Malani, winner of the 2023 Kyoto Prize in Art and Philosophy, has long addressed geopolitical concerns in a video and painting practice grounded in inspirations as diverse as history, literature, daily life, philosophy, and mythology. For her new solo exhibition, Arario Gallery brings together some of Malani's recent works.
These include My Reality is Different (2022), a projection of nine overlapping videos that play a series of hand-drawn iPad animations in a continuous loop. Previously shown at the Holburne Museum, Bath, in 2022 and at the National Gallery in London earlier this year, the animations moved across paintings in each gallery's collections, eventually covering them.
The animations are accompanied by a narration about Cassandra, the ill-fated prophetess from Greek mythology who, for Malani, represents 'female instinct and thought'. As the artist told Ocula Magazine: 'If we paid more attention to the Cassandra aspect of ourselves, I think we certainly [would] know what's right for the future.'
Currently being painted at the time of writing is a new version of City of Desires, a mural painting-performance Malini first staged in 1992. The Wall Drawing/Erasure Performances usually begin before an exhibition opens, with Malani collaborating with local artists to explore such themes as memory and shared experiences.
Towards the exhibition's closing, the artist erases the murals. At Arario Gallery, Malani is working with Korean artists including Sim Raejung and Lee Yejoo on a wall drawing that will be revealed on opening day.
Donald Judd
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul Fort Hill, 122-1, Dokseodang-ro, Yongsan-gu
4 September–20 October 2023
Expect: Donald Judd's early paintings and sculptural works, as well as woodcut prints conceived while visiting Korea in 1991, but not exhibited in the country until now.
Before Seoul emerged as the contemporary art hub that it is now, the city's art scene was surprised to see Donald Judd's solo exhibition at Ingong Gallery in 1991. Thaddaeus Ropac presents the first solo show of Judd in Seoul in nearly a decade, curated by his son and artistic director of the Judd Foundation, Flavin Judd.
The exhibition follows Judd's increasing emphasis on form and the object over representation as he moved from paintings to three-dimensional works in the 1960s, after which he experimented with negative and positive space in sculptures and woodcuts.
Flavin Judd noted to Ocula Advisory: 'Even after Don came off the wall and started making floor works that went beyond shallow reliefs, he continued to make two-dimensional hanji paper prints. They were a way to experiment with flat planes—he said that while it's a contradiction, they were fun to make.'
Also on view at Thaddaeus Ropac is Reservoirs of impulse: drawings, 1950s–1980s (4 September–20 October 2023), a solo presentation of Joseph Beuys' drawings that reflect his lifelong fascination with nature.
More Exhibitions to See
Also on our radar are EROS, a group exhibition on the place of desire in modern society at P21; Eva Presenhuber's group presentation of works by 13 international artists at TAXA Seoul; Of Hundred Carts and On, Barakat Contemporary's solo presentation of Jewyo Rhii, whose provocative sculptural installations interrogate societal structures; Do and Be, a show of new ceramic works by Tavares Strachan at Perrotin; Leiko Ikemura's arresting paintings in Soul Scape Seoul at KÖNIG GALERIE; Big King Airlines New Engine Fundraising Drive, Ryu Sungsil's fundraiser show for a fictive airlines company at CYLINDER 2; and Moka Lee's luminous portraits at Jason Haam. —[O]
