10+ art exhibitions to see in Seoul during Frieze Seoul 2026

Frieze Seoul will return to COEX from 2–5 September for its fifth edition, bringing more than 125 galleries from 30 countries to the Korean capital. With more than 70 per cent of participating galleries coming from the Asia-Pacific region. This year’s edition will introduce new curated sections including Material Practice, exploring the relationship between contemporary art, craft and design, and Spotlight, which will focus on overlooked artists of the 20th century. Focus will also expand its international reach, featuring 16 emerging galleries from Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Frieze Seoul 2025. Photo by WeCap Studio. Courtesy of Frieze.

The fair’s programme will extend beyond the gallery booths, with z LIVE, Frieze Film, Frieze Music, talks and the Frieze Seoul Artist Award, while Neighbourhood Nights will bring galleries and cultural spaces across Euljiro, Hannam, Cheongdam and Samcheong into the festivities. It will also be the final year that Frieze Seoul and Kiaf SEOUL take place simultaneously at COEX, with Kiaf marking its 25th edition. In 2027, Frieze Seoul will move to Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), the landmark cultural venue designed by Zaha Hadid, as its new home following the redevelopment of COEX.

SMB13 X Frieze Film Seoul 2025. SeMA Rooftop, 2025. 09. 02. Photo: Hong Cheolki. Courtesy of Seoul Museum of Art

With Frieze Seoul providing one focal point, Seoul Art Week offers a chance to look beyond the fair and explore the wider cultural landscape. Running from 2–6 September 2026, the city-wide programme brings together museums, foundations and galleries, with exhibitions covering Korean modernism, major retrospectives, conceptual art and international contemporary practice. September is an especially good time to take in the breadth of Seoul’s art scene, with a programme that extends well beyond the fair itself. Here is our guide to the exhibitions to see during Seoul Art Week 2026.

Koo Jeong A: OUSSSMOS

KOO JEONG A, LAND OF OUSS [KANGSE] Installation view, 2025 - 2026, LUMA Arles, France. Image credit Victor & Simon - Grégoire d'Ablon.

#FLODown: The largest solo exhibition in Korea to date by Koo Jeong A will open at the Leeum Museum of Art during Seoul Art Week. OUSSSMOS will bring together three decades of her work, including her experiments with phosphorescence, magnets, scent and skatepark architecture. Rather than treating the museum simply as a place to display objects, Koo will use its galleries and unexpected spaces to create an environment in which light, movement, smell and other sensory experiences become part of the work. The exhibition will offer an opportunity to see how her interest in invisible forces and alternative ways of experiencing space has developed over the course of her career.

Date: 5 September – 27 December 2026. Location: Leeum Museum of Art, 60-16 Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul. leeumhoam.org

Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024. Polyester, stainless steel. Photo by Jeon Taeg Su. © Do Ho Suh

#FLODown: Do Ho Suh returns to Seoul this autumn for a major exhibition at MMCA Seoul. Best known for his translucent fabric recreations of houses, corridors and other architectural spaces, Suh has spent decades exploring migration, memory, home and belonging. The exhibition traces these ideas through early works, major installations and ongoing projects, including Nest/s (2024), a vast work that considers the home as something shaped by movement, relationships and shared experience.

Date: 27 August 2026 – 9 February 2027. Location: MMCA Seoul, 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul. mmca.go.kr

Sol LeWitt: Open Structure

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #770, Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2025. Photo by Kazuo Fukunaga. © 2026 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.

#FLODown: Amorepacific Museum of Art will stage the first major solo exhibition of Sol LeWitt in Korea, offering a rare chance to see how an artist turned a set of rules into an open-ended form of art. His wall drawings, created from written instructions rather than fixed objects, are redrawn for each space and change with every iteration. The exhibition features 45 works, including 13 wall drawings, alongside structures, paintings, photographs, prints and archival material, tracing LeWitt’s fascination with geometry, repetition and systems. Rather than treating the finished object as the endpoint, LeWitt made the idea behind a work part of the work itself, a radical shift that helped shape conceptual art.

Date: 1 September 2026 – 28 February 2027. Location: Amorepacific Museum of Art, 100 Hangang-daero, Yongsan-gu, Seoul. apma.amorepacific.com

Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956–1976

Aleksandra Kasuba, Spectral Passage, 1975. Installation view of "Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artsits 1956-1976" at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2023. Image credit by Constantin Mirbach. Courtesy of Haus der Kunst, Munich.

#FLODown: Inside Other Spaces will revisit a largely overlooked chapter in postwar art, when artists began to move beyond painting and sculpture and use the gallery itself as their material. The exhibition will feature experimental environments by women artists including Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi, Aleksandra Kasuba, Marta Minujín, Nanda Vigo and Tsuruko Yamazaki, alongside Korean artist Jung Kang-ja. Many of the works were temporary and disappeared after their original exhibitions, making the reconstructions from archival photographs, plans and other records an important part of the presentation. The exhibition will offer a broader account of the development of installation art, bringing greater attention to women artists from Asia, Europe and the Americas whose work has often been overlooked.

Date: until 29 November 2026. Location: Leeum Museum of Art, 60-16 Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul. leeumhoam.org.

Outside the galleries at Leeum Museum, don’t miss Gabriel Orozco’s garden. In London, Orozco will have a major solo exhibition opening at White Cube Bermondsey in September, featuring more than 100 new and existing works across sculpture, painting, photography, assemblage and works on paper.

Yang Ah Ham: Undefined Panorama

REMOTE. Yang Ah Ham: Undefined Panorama. Exhibition Graphic, 2026. Graphic Design: REMOTE.

#FLODown: Yang Ah Ham’s Undefined Panorama began in 2018 as an ongoing investigation into how we understand the world and our place within it. The exhibition will bring together earlier works, archival material and the new eight-channel video installation Undefined Panorama 4.0. Ham’s work considers the relationship between individuals and the wider social structures in which they live, while her new work will also consider the possibility of coexistence between human and non-human life. The exhibition will occupy all three floors of Art Sonje Center.

Date: 31 July – 4 October 2026. Location: Art Sonje Center, 87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul. artsonje.org

Es Devlin: The Third Poem: Come Home Again

Es Devlin, Mirror Maze, 2026. Mirror glass, sound, LED, dimensions variable. Photo © FUTURA SEOUL.

#FLODown: Es Devlin makes her Korean solo debut at Futura Seoul with an exhibition exploring connection, empathy and the relationship between humans and the natural world. The show features a library made from thousands of books, a mirror maze, participatory drawing works and Come Home Again, an installation created for Seoul that brings together drawings, voices and recordings of local wildlife. It is a distinctly theatrical presentation, with visitors becoming part of the work rather than simply observing it.

Date: 20 August 2026 – 17 January 2027. Location: FUTURA Seoul, Seoul. futuraseoul.org

Muyeong Kim: PigX

Muyeong Kim: Pig.Exhibition Graphic, 2026. Graphic Design by Muyeong Kim.

#FLODown: Muyeong Kim will make his first solo museum presentation at Art Sonje Center, using the institution’s theatre space to examine the relationship between photography, performance and architecture. Pig will include new photographs made on Sorok Island alongside black-and-white photographs taken during the renovation of Seodaemun Prison History Hall. Kim’s work looks at the ways spaces can position and control the body.

Date: 28 August – 4 October 2026. Location: Art Hall, Art Sonje Center, 87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul. artsonje.org

The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision

Robert Delaunay, « La Ville de Paris ». 1910 - 1912 - Domaine public - Crédit photographique : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Georges Meguerditchian/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn

#FLODown: The inaugural exhibition at Centre Pompidou Hanwha, The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision, looks at the movement that transformed how artists represented the world in the early 20th century. Around 90 paintings and sculptures by more than 40 artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay, trace Cubism from its beginnings in Paris through its international influence. A dedicated Korea Focus section considers how Cubist ideas reached Korea and influenced the development of Korean modern art, placing the movement in a wider cultural context.

Date: 4 June – 4 October 2026. Location: Centre Pompidou Hanwha, 63 Building, 50 63-ro, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul. centrepompidou.fr

Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me

Work (1964) by South Korean modernist pioneer Yoo Youngkuk

#FLODown: Seoul Museum of Art celebrates Yoo Youngkuk, one of the pioneers of Korean abstract art, with a major retrospective marking the 110th anniversary of his birth. More than 170 paintings, reliefs, photographs, drawings and archival materials highlight the recurring subjects of his career, particularly mountains, colour and geometric form. The exhibition shows how Yoo developed a distinctive visual language from the Korean landscape,

Date: 19 May – 25 October 2026. Location: Seoul Museum of Art, Seosomun Main Branch, 61 Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul. sema.seoul.go.kr

Lee Bae: En attendant: Waiting

Lee Bae, Issu du Feu, 800x250x250cm, Charcoal, 2026 ⓒ Museum SAN, Photo by Sangtae Kim

#FLODown: Lee Bae’s first solo exhibition at Museum SAN surveys more than five decades of work across painting, sculpture, installation and video. Charcoal is a defining material in Lee’s practice, used to explore transformation, destruction, renewal and the passage of time. His works appear across the museum’s galleries and outdoor spaces, where their pared-back forms are set against Tadao Ando’s architecture and the surrounding landscape. Museum SAN is outside Seoul and is best visited as a separate day trip.

Date: 7 April – 6 December 2026. Location: Museum SAN, 260 Oak Valley 2-gil, Jijeong-myeon, Wonju, Gangwon-do. museumsan.org

Marina Rheingantz: Míope

Marina Rheingantz, Miope, 2026. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Eduardo Ortega

#FLODown: Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz makes her Korean solo debut at White Cube with new paintings and textile works made in her São Paulo studio over the past year. Míope, meaning “nearsighted’, explores landscapes, fragments and interior spaces, drawing on memories of Brazil’s natural environment alongside references to frescoes, ancient objects and the paintings of Édouard Vuillard. The exhibition opens during Frieze week, with White Cube staying open until 10pm for Cheongdam Night on 2 September.

Date: 1 September – 24 October 2026. Location: White Cube Seoul, 6 Dosan-daero 45-gil, Seoul. whitecube.com

Neighbourhood Nights

Seoul, South Korea. Image credit Yohan Cho.

Throughout Seoul Art Week, Seoul’s various districts will host Neighbourhood Nights, offering a brilliant way to explore the city’s cultural quarters. Each evening, a different neighbourhood will host late openings, performances and events, Euljiro Night on Monday 31 August, Hannam Night on Tuesday 1 September, Cheongdam Night on Wednesday 2 September and Samcheong Night on Thursday 3 September.