Across Korea this autumn, the country’s cultural landscape is being transformed by the presence of some of the world’s greatest modern and contemporary artists. In Seoul, the incendiary marks of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the contemplative bodies of Antony Gormley, the light and color of Ugo Rondinone, and in Gyeonggi Province, the memory and wounds of Louise Bourgeois, all converge to meet thousands of visitors.

At Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), the special exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Symbolic Signs Linking Past and Future” runs through January 31, 2026. Born in 1960 and dying prematurely at age 28, Basquiat produced around 3,000 works in a brief career and has been hailed as a modern art icon—variously called the “black Picasso” and a master of graffiti-inflected imagery. The centerpiece of the DDP show is the massive Flesh and Spirit (approx. 3.6 × 3.6 m), in which Basquiat inscribes anatomical and medical terms—like “cerebrum” and “femur”—amid energetic brushwork and raw symbolic registers that evoke life, desire, death, and loss. SuumProject’s curator Lee Ji-yoon describes the show as a “new reading of Basquiat’s exploration of signs, language, image, and rhythm in a Korean context.” A supplementary installation dubbed “The Temple of Words” reveals Basquiat’s notebooks and provides insight into his linguistic and visual imagination.

Simultaneously, British sculptor Sir Antony Gormley has opened a two-part solo exhibition titled “Inextricable” across White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac galleries in Seoul, timed to coincide with Frieze Seoul. The exhibition interrogates the entanglement between humanity and the urban environment, exploring the tensions between body and architecture, intimacy and public exposure. This marks Gormley’s first major solo presentation in Seoul. His works—often casting the human figure as both vessel and threshold—challenge viewers to reflect on their own presence in space. theartnewspaper.com+3Tatler Asia+3Thaddaeus Ropac+3

One striking installation, Body Twist IV, is placed along the pedestrian path of Dosan-daero. As passersby must twist around it, the piece compels them to physically engage, disrupting ordinary movement. Gormley remarked that he aimed to make sculpture like a rock in a flowing stream—embedded yet disruptive to passage, urging reflection: “You are confronted with: Who are you, and where do you stand in your world?” White Cube+2Tatler Asia+2

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone is concurrently showing “in beauty bright” at Gladstone Gallery in Seoul through October 18. The exhibition presents 13 new watercolor landscapes, each composed using just four lines and five pastel tones (pink, blue, yellow, purple, green). Though minimal in form, the works evoke mountain lakes and alpine vistas with quiet resonance. The repeated composition in subtly shifting color symbolizes a meditative encounter with nature. Assets+3gladstonegallery.com+3Ocula+3

In Gyeonggi Province, Ho-Am Art Museum in Yongin hosts Louise Bourgeois: Ephemeral and Eternal, open until January 4, 2026. This retrospective, the largest in South Korea in 25 years, spans 106 works from Bourgeois’s 1940s paintings to her later fabric and sculptural pieces. As a pioneer of feminist art and a sculptor of memory and the unconscious, Bourgeois’s work is deeply autobiographical—often navigating trauma, motherhood, sexuality, and identity. The monumental bronze spider Maman evokes protective yet ominous maternal presence. The exhibition divides the floors into a “conscious” level and an “unconscious” realm, inviting visitors to wander through Bourgeois’s inner journey. In particular, her 1974 piece The Destruction of the Father is dramatically staged with red lighting and abstraction of violence, confronting viewers with ambivalent feelings of rage and vulnerability.

These exhibitions together represent an artistic constellation across Korean cities, bringing Basquiat’s symbolic fire, Gormley’s sculptural introspection, Rondinone’s serene color meditations, and Bourgeois’s emotional gravitas into public conversation. In a season already rich with autumnal hues, these shows overlay Korea’s natural beauty with the bold, introspective, unsettling, and poetic dimensions of global contemporary art.

SayArt.net
Maria Kim sayart2022@gmail.com