ART BASEL IN BASEL 2025

Furthermore, Art Basel has launched its first awards program Art Basel Awards, selecting 36 medalists and celebrating their contributions to contemporary art including artists, curators, as well as patrons and institutions of the arts throughout the duration of the fair. The inaugural Art Basel Awards are expected not only to cement Art Basel’s influence but also to keep with its larger mission of amplifying connections between contemporary art and global culture.

This year, Kukje Gallery presents a comprehensive selection of works by both Korean and international artists from a wide range of generations. Featured in the booth is a work by the seminal Dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-Bo, Écriture No. 230101 (2023). Hues of red with an intensity reminiscent of fire cover a ceramic surface, well encapsulating the later works of Park inspired by elements of nature. Also on view is Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 24-58 (2024), a new work from his signature Conjunction series. The piece offers a variation on Ha’s signature bae-ap-bub (‘back pressure method’) technique—pushing paint from the reverse side of a coarse hemp cloth to the front—by applying varied brushstrokes to the front of the canvas. Ha will be presenting a solo exhibition Ha Chong-Hyun: Light Into Color at the Château La Coste located in Aix-en-Provence, France, opening on June 22, 2025. In addition to the aforementioned works, Korean first-generation woman sculptor Kim Yun Shin’s painting Song of My Soul 2009-272 (2009) encapsulates her artistic philosophy in viewing nature not as an object of contemplation, but as a subject that ‘adds to one’ with the artist, expressing through vibrant colours, lines, and planes the eternity of life’s gifts and the primordial voracity of life. Lee Ufan, who has been working with the art of emptiness, presents Dialogue (2021). The singular brushstroke creating a gradation on the canvas, otherwise empty with negative space, calls forth a sense of contemplation about the emptiness immediately surrounding as well as far beyond the painting.

Conceptual artist Kim Yong-Ik, who has been challenging and creating rifts in modernist conventions, presents Exhausting Project: The World of the Dead —3 (2023). The work, with the Chinese character ‘冥(dark)’ situated in the centre of various geometric circles and squares, embodies the Eastern philosophy concerning the composition and theories of the cosmos particularly pertaining to the dichotomies of yin and yang, heaven and earth, high and low. Kyoto-based Korean contemporary artist Jae-Eun Choi presents When We First Met (2025). Choi picks flowers she encounters in walks around her studio and labels their names within each frame of the work, meditating on the order and cyclical nature of the universe as well as the mundane or the concept of nature itself through the act of recounting the flowers’ names. Also featured in the booth is artist Haegue Yang’s new work Mesmerizing Votive Pagoda Lantern – Frosted Lotus Ultramundane Flowers (2025), inspired by white Japanese Sanuki lanterns, intimately associated with regional festivities, religious traditions, and funeral rituals, ultimately investigating the connections between material and the spiritual through the medium of paper and its regenerative and healing, or yearning qualities. Yang is currently participating in the traveling exhibition Leap Year at Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands through August 24, 2025, and the group exhibition Reimagining Radical Cities at the New Taipei City Art Museum (NTCAM) in Taiwan through 7 September 2025. Suki Seokyeong Kang’s Mora 55 × 40—Bold #15 (2018–2024), a work inspired by the linguistic concept of ‘mora,’ draws on the minimal unit of sound duration. Horizontally laid canvas and layers of gouache create an abstract surface that accumulates temporality and narrative through the physical nature of paint. Just Life (2024–2025), a work from Sungsic Moon’s rose series, is also on view, embodying a balance of pathos and beauty, capturing the ephemeral moments in our everyday life through the compositional lens of East Asian painting. Through a technique involving scratching away thick oil paint with a graphite pencil, Moon invites the viewers to recount the quotidian moments of their life by imbuing his works with the cyclical energy of the cosmos as those seen in the passing seasons, or the flow of life and death.

The booth also features works by internationally acclaimed artists. Anish Kapoor will present Organic Green to Clear (2016) from his iconic series of concave mirrors, reflecting its vicinity while also distorting objects situated afar due to its concave curvature. Kapoor places great emphasis on such two-sided phenomena and the potential chaos they can cause, continuing to experiment with materiality. Daniel Boyd’s diptych composed of Untitled (HCBNMTLIR) (2025) and Untitled (BFWTFA) (2025) depicts the Greek god Apollo. Boyd represents Apollo as an embodiment of Western ideals of beauty based on institutions of imperialism, white supremacy, and further, pseudoscience and racial hierarchies; amidst a growing rift in Eurocentric categorical perspectives and an abundance of new varied avenues of thinking, Boyd suggests new possibilities ahead.

Meanwhile, on view at Kukje Gallery is Next Painting: As We Are, a group exhibition of young painters at the gallery’s K1 and K3 spaces through July 20, 2025. The exhibition aims to assess the ‘painting after painting’—the ‘next painting’ to come—through the work of six young artists from the millennial generation, born in the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. Simultaneously, the Hanok space is dedicated to A Faraway Today, a group exhibition curated by artist Park Chan-kyong. The exhibition examines how traditions continue to evolve and transform our present-day reality, and how inherited legacies from the past encounter languages of contemporary art. The exhibition title suggests this temporality of tradition—something that is ‘distant yet near,’ or ‘dim yet still lingering.’ At Kukje Gallery’s Busan outpost, Yeondoo Jung’s solo exhibition The Inevitable, Inacceptable runs through20 July 2025. Blending the rhythms of blues music and fermentation, the artist offers a unique perspective on humour, hope, and navigating life’s uncontrollable realities.