Major Museum Exhibitions During Frieze Seoul 2024
From a survey of Asian feminist art to exhibitions by Elmgreen & Dragset and Anicka YI
From a survey of Asian feminist art to exhibitions by Elmgreen & Dragset and Anicka YI
Leeum Museum of Art: ‘Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, but in This One’
Art Spectrum 2024: ‘Dream Screen’
5 September – 29 December
There are two highly anticipated exhibitions at Leeum Museum of Art, where Korean-American artist Anicka Yi makes her Asian institutional debut, and Rirkrit Tiravanija brings together an engaging showcase of young Asian art.
Co-organized by UCCA Beijing, ‘Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, but in This One’ presents around 40 works, including new commissions that expand Yi’s experimental practice as well as earlier works that trace the development of her unorthodox use of organic matter, animatronics and fragrance over the past 15 years. The exhibition features the artist’s recent projects, which focus on the intelligence of non-human entities such as machines, fungi and seaweed to raise questions about anthropocentric thinking.
The museum unveils the newest edition of its long-running Art Spectrum exhibition series: a thematic group presentation of young artists hailing from across the region. With Rirkrit Tiravanija as artistic director, ‘Dream Screen’ navigates the varied creative sensibilities of millennial artists and collectives. Among the 24 participants are Choi Yun, Kim Heecheon and Lee Eunsae (Korea), Wang Bo and Zhang Vivien (China), Kamonlak Sukchai (Thailand) and Yi-Fan Li (Taiwan).
Amorepacific Museum of Art ‘Elmgreen & Dragset: Spaces’
3 September – 23 February 2025
Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset mark 30 years of artistic collaboration with one of their biggest exhibitions to date. Held in the cavernous galleries of the Amorepacific Museum of Art, ‘Elmgreen & Dragset: Spaces’ shows off the artists’ singular ability to construct new identities and subvert specific historical or social contexts through their uncanny spatial interventions. The various rooms staged in this exhibition invite viewers to situate themselves amid alternate realities that evoke facets of urban life across cultures and time.
Their most ambitious work on view is a domestic space reminiscent of The Collectors, originally presented at the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2009. In Seoul, viewers approach the house from the outside before exploring the interior, prompting conflicting impulses of innocuous curiosity and deliberate invasion of privacy. Elsewhere, the artists reimagine The Whitechapel Pool (2018) as a luxury swimming pool devoid of patrons and filled with an array of lifeless white sculptures. Ambitious and affective, the exhibition echoes with absence yet bears indelible traces of myriad lives.
Ilmin Museum of Art ‘IMA Picks 2024: Bek Hyunjin, Kim Minae and Cha Jeamin’
30 August – 17 November
lmin Museum of Art spotlights three contemporary Korean artists whose practices forge new perspectives on ‘aesthetic reality’. In ‘IMA Picks 2024’ Bek Hyunjin, Kim Minae and Cha Jeamin mount concurrent solo exhibitions across the three floors of the museum’s historic building, each independent of the others.
Bek’s multidisciplinary output includes abstract paintings, installations and performances executed without clear plans or objectives. He relies on intuitive processes to guide his engagement with the canvas as a space where gesture, movement, and poetic and musical rhythm overlap. Through sculpture, Kim responds to architectural space by metaphorically exposing the contradictions of institutional structures. She reimagines the exhibition space as a perceptual frame within which viewers find themselves on equal terms with her playful sculptures. Quietly captivating video installations by Cha are informed by on-site research and personal interviews with individuals afflicted by anomalous maladies. The resulting works explore mysterious phenomena experienced by marginalized members of society, whether cognitively, emotionally or physically.
SONGEUN ‘Portrait of a Collection: Selected Works from the Pinault Collection’
4 September – 23 November
Masterworks from one of the world’s great contemporary art collections fill the galleries of SONGEUN, where ‘Portrait of a Collection’ presents around 60 pieces owned by French billionaire François Pinault, including video installations, sculptures, drawings and paintings. Caroline Bourgeois, chief curator of the Pinault Collection, has assembled a star-studded list of 22 established and emerging artists.
The exhibition emphasises ‘companionship’, a core tenet of Pinault’s collecting ethos. His long-term collaborations have resulted in deep holdings of works by artists including David Hammons, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and Rudolf Stingel, all of whom are featured prominently in the exhibition, in dialogue with younger artists. The exhibition unfolds across three floors of the Herzog & De Meuron-designed SONGEUN building, creating connections among artists from different generations and cultures that collectively reveal a compelling portrait of an extraordinary collection.
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
‘Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists’
3 September – 3 March 2025
Contemporary reassessments of historically overlooked artists continue to inform the exhibition program at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Following the success of last year’s survey of Korean experimental art of the 1960s and ’70s, which traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MMCA presents ‘Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists’, bringing feminist art practices from throughout Asia into comparative cultural dialogue. The exhibition focuses on artists from the 1960s to the present day through the lens of transcorporeality, a social-environmental theory that overlaps with feminist discourse, preserving horizontal connections while resisting hierarchies.
More than 100 artworks by 60 artists engage with topics such as ‘bodies as spaces of resistance’, ‘territory of sexuality’, ‘between goddess and monster’, ‘street performances’, ‘body, language, gestures’ and ‘multiple bodies’. The thematic structure offers multidimensional explorations of Asian women artists that transcend chronological classification and encourage intergenerational readings of their works. Shigeko Kubota (Japan), Lee Bul (Korea), Pacita Abad (Philippines), Melati Suryodarmo (Indonesia), Mrinalini Mukherjee (India) and Yin Xiuzhen (China) are notable participants, but visitors are certain to make new discoveries throughout this landmark exhibition.
This article first appeared in Frieze Week, Seoul 2024.
Further Information
Frieze Seoul, COEX, 4 – 7 September 2024.
Limited tickets for Frieze Seoul are now on sale – don’t miss out, buy yours now. Alternatively, become a member to enjoy premier access, multi-day entry, exclusive guided tours and more.
A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room opens in the week before the fair, offering audiences a first look at the presentations and the ability to engage with the fair remotely.
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Main image: Riar Rizaldi, Otonomi Feral, 2024. Courtesy: the artist
