Jae-Eun Choi, a contemporary artist active between Seoul and Tokyo, is the subject of the solo exhibition La Vita Nuova at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, Japan. As the inaugural installment of the project “Ecology: A Dialogue on Circulations,” organized by the Hermès Foundation to examine art from an ecological perspective, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of Choi’s artistic practice spanning four decades, through which she has engaged in a constant dialogue with nature. 

The exhibition primarily features works that contemplate on the transcendence of nature beyond human intervention and reach. In World Underground Project (1986-1991), the infinite cycle of time is encapsulated as traditional Japanese paper washi gets buried in seven different locations around the world, later unearthed, and transformed into a work of art. Similarly, Dreaming of Earth (2015-ongoing) project draws inspiration from the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), paradoxically functioning as an ecological conservation area. Additionally, White Death (2023), a recent work composed of dead coral, and A Poet’s Atelier (2023), which addresses the imminent extinction of unnamed plant species, articulate the artist’s poetic perspective on the ecological challenges confronting today’s environment.

Concurrently, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is hosting its 20th-anniversary exhibition, Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living, in conjunction with the project. Choi’s solo exhibition will be on display until January 28, 2024, followed by the second part of the project—a group exhibition featuring the participation of four contemporary artists.

Works by Ha Chong-Hyun and Lee Seung Jio are on view in the group exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s, held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA. Previously presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul in May, this traveling exhibition focuses on the avant-garde activities of young Korean artists in the 1960s and 70s and brings together more than 80 significant works by leading figures in experimental art of the period.

Korean experimental art emerged in the late 1960s and 70s, a period marked by turbulent socioeconomic, political, and cultural changes spurred by the rapid urbanization and modernization following the Korean War. Young artists in this period sought to confront the ever-changing present by creating boundary-pushing works, including new media and art forms such as objects, happenings, film, and video, beyond the realm of conventional painting and sculpture. Originating from issues shaped by the authoritarian state of the Korean military regime in the 1960s and 70s, Korean experimental art is clearly distinct from its American counterpart. This exhibition holds significance as the first dedicated to Korean experimental art in a North American museum, reflecting these pivotal phases of Korean history.

In this exhibition, Ha presents four early works integral to Korean art history, including White Paper on Urban Planning (1967), which encapsulates the artist's interest in urbanization in Korea in the late 1960s with its distinctly compartmentalized geometric forms. In Work 73-13 (1973), the grid-like barbed wire recalls the post-war situation in Korea, while its pointed ends that pierce the back of the canvas resemble the bars of a prison cell, signifying the artist's silent resistance to the dictatorship of the time.

Nucleus F-G-999 (1970) by Lee Seung Jio, a pioneering figure in Korean geometric abstraction, stands in stark contrast with the dominant style of the time. Featuring a V-shaped arrangement of pipes, the work demonstrates the artist's precise visual language, responding to the turbulent time through the illusion of metallic surfaces achieved through simple forms and tonal variations within a rigid order.

The exhibition at the Guggenheim will remain on view through January 7, 2024, and then travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on February 11, 2024.

Hyun-Sook Lee, founder and chairwoman of Kukje Gallery, has been selected as one of ArtReview’s Power 100, ranking 92 on the list of the most influential figures in the art world as announced by the British arts magazine on December 1, 2023. Published since 2002, Power 100 announces an annual roster of the most distinguished figures in the international art scene, selected upon a thorough analysis of their recent activities and impact in the industry. Panelists and collaborators have helped ArtReview construct the list, consisting of artists and artist collectives, collectors, curators, fairs, galleries, museum directors, thinkers, and social movements.

Since Lee’s initial appearance on the list in 2015, in which she has placed 82, this year marks her 9th consecutive year of being named on the Power 100. In acknowledgement of Lee’s exceptional contribution to and influence over the ever-shifting global landscapes of contemporary art, ArtReview published the following statement on their official website.

“Sometimes influence finds you as much as you seek it. Geopolitical shifts far beyond the Kukje Gallery founder’s control have made Seoul a power spot in the Asian artworld. Yet with 40 years under her belt, representing the likes of Lee Ufan (who showed in two of her three Seoul gallery spaces in April), Anish Kapoor (who in August took over all three with his visceral sculptures and paintings) and Haegue Yang (who has long worked with Kukje, showing over the summer at the gallery’s Hanok, a traditional Korean house), Lee is no ingenue. While Park Seo-Bo passed away in October this year, it was Lee who had helped renew interest in his work and the wider Dansaekhwa movement. In Busan, where she has had a gallery since 2018, there were shows for a similar mix of blue-chip names from both the West and East, including Wook-Kyung Choi, Julian Opie, and Byron Kim.”

Along with Hyun-Sook Lee, Haegue Yang has joined this year’s Power 100 roster, ranking 71. ArtReview has cited: “When the international artworld came to Seoul in September, it was natural that Kukje, which represents Yang, would dedicate a show to her – she is one of South Korea’s biggest art stars. Yang, however, is rarely at home. Incorporating Venetian blinds, clothing racks, synthetic straw and other such diverse materials, her sculpture featured in a vertiginous number of exhibitions this year, ranging from Several Reenactments at SMAK Ghent, which became Continuous Reenactments at Helsinki Art Museum; to Quasi-Colloquial, which inaugurated Pinacoteca de São Paulo’s new contemporary museum; and Changing From From To From at the National Gallery of Australia, the Canberra institution buying most of the show for its collection. For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale she showed a work featuring over 100,000 bells, and at Performa in New York she staged the sixth iteration of The Malady of Death (2015–), a rare performance based on the eponymous Marguerite Duras text, while she prepares for a large-scale survey show in the Hayward Gallery, London, in autumn next year; all this while continuing as a professor at Frankfurt’s Städelschule."

Meanwhile, fellow Korean luminaries from this year’s list include Doryun Chong, Chief Curator of M+, Hong Kong, listed at 17, together with the museum’s director, Suhanya Raffel; and the South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and academic Byung-Chul Han, who continues his tenure as professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, placed 24. Nan Goldin, the legendary photographer topped the list, while Hito Steyerl, who was already listed as the number one in the 2017 Power 100 List, came second. The rest of the 2023 Power 100 list can be viewed on ArtReview's website (https://artreview.com/power-100/).

Swiss contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone is the subject of the solo exhibition burn to shine at Fosun Foundation in Shanghai, China. The exhibition derives its title from the poetry collection You've Got to Burn to Shine (1994) by American poet John Giorno, the artist’s departed partner. Bringing together a selection of Rondinone's recent works spanning video, painting, and sculpture, the exhibition delves into the artist’s contemplation on the cycles of life and death, as well as nature that deeply involves such existential experiences. 

Occupying the entire second floor, the video work BURN TO SHINE (2022) shows a group of percussionists and dancers performing as they wait for sunrise over an uncharted desert. Here, the arrangement of six large screens forming a circle, paired with energetically urgent drumbeats, creates an immersive experience for the viewers, positioning them as integral to both nature and the performance. This thematic motif of time and nature’s flow extends to the third floor, where his watercolor series mattituck lies. Depicting the sunset at his home on Long Island, New York, 14 paintings are spaced equally across the walls, intuitively conveying the eternity of the constant repetition of sunset and moonrise. 
The exhibition also presents the horizons, a series of horse sculptures that suggest “a landscape confined inside the body” through a horizontal structure created by two different shades of blue glass, and nuns and monks, a collection of large bronze sculptures placed on the rooftop against a panoramic backdrop of the city. 

In burn to shine, Rondinone continues to explore the coexistence and interdependence between the natural world, Romanticism, and existentialism, recording the essence and elemental features of nature. The exhibition remains on view through January 1, 2024. 

The Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset are the subject of a major solo exhibition, Bonne Chance, at Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France. Marking their first solo exhibition in a French institution, Bonne Chance introduces a selection of the duo’s installations that replicate common urban settings and scenarios across the museum’s Grand Nef, Forum, and rooftop gallery.

Collaborating since 1995, Elmgreen & Dragset are known for their work that reimagines traditional exhibition spaces, transforming them into settings that resemble other institutional environments. Through their witty and critical interpretations of social and everyday stereotypes, these transformations allude to the underlying systems within everyday spaces and invite visitors to reevaluate aspects of contemporary society from new perspectives.

Within the exhibition, the duo redefines the exhibition format by conceiving temporary architectures and life-sized models of public and private spatial settings, reminiscent of those seen in everyday life. Notably, The One & the Many recreates an apartment structure commonly seen in Berlin. Other familiar settings, such as a theater auditorium, public restroom, laboratory, conference room, morgue, CCTV surveillance room, and desolate office landscape, are presented within labyrinthine structures throughout the museum.

The life-like silicone figures engaging in various activities intensify the discomfort and artificiality evoked by the duo's urban environment. As visitors meander through and encounter these nameless figures, they are invited to engage more actively with the exhibition, piecing together different clues and making conjectures about what might have happened or what is about to unfold at each spot. However, the various structures and staged scenarios that viewers navigate, akin to playing a game, follow an incoherent logic where normal rules no longer apply. Through this deliberate paradox, Elmgreen & Dragset highlight the absurd systems of contemporary society where defeat and exclusion prevail. 

Adding a touch of irony through its title, Bonne Chance renders the large-scale structures utterly powerless, demonstrating that one’s win is not a result of chance but potentially of choice. The exhibition remains on view until April 1, 2024.

The internationally acclaimed German artist Candida Höfer has been selected as the recipient of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2024. Established in 1960 by the Berlin Academy of Arts, the Käthe Kollwitz Prize is awarded on an annual basis to a visual artist with a former connection to Berlin. Previous winners of the prize include Peter Weibel (2004), Hito Steyerl (2019), and Nan Goldin (2022).

Höfer’s works, often defined as “portraits of spaces,” meticulously capture the unique attributes of each space, including its architectural structure, social function, cultural purpose, and ambience. Commending Höfer’s contributions to contemporary photography over the past five decades, the jury remarked that the artist “imbues these spaces with a profound, almost spiritual quality through her precise framing and details, further emphasized by the absence of people.”

Widely presented around the world through innumerable exhibitions, Höfer has participated in documenta11 (2002) in Kassel, Germany, co-represented Germany at the national pavilion of the 50th edition of La Biennale di Venezia (2003) in Italy, and received the Outstanding Contribution to Photography by the Sony World Photography Awards in 2018. Her works can also be found in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao.

The award ceremony will take place on September 13, 2024, at the Berlin Academy of Arts, accompanied by a solo exhibition showcasing Höfer’s works at the same venue in celebration of the occasion.

Lee Ufan is the subject of an eponymous solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany. Spanning Lee’s artistic practice for over five decades, this comprehensive retrospective presents approximately 50 works, including paintings, sculptures, and installations, by the prominent figure of Japan’s Mono-ha and Korea’s Dansaekhwa movements.

Lee Ufan played a crucial role in establishing and developing the Mono-ha school, an avant-garde art movement that originated in Japan in the late 1960s. As a key pioneer of the movement, Lee has examined the inherent characteristics of materials and their relationships, focusing on the encounter between the self and the other as well as the “encounter with the world as it is.” At the core of his practice is the exploration of the spatial and physical relationship between what he creates and does not, as well as between what he paints and what he chooses to leave unpainted.

The exhibition introduces a diverse array of Lee's work, including the reenactments of his early works, such as Fourth Structure B (1968) and Landscape I (1968), alongside works from his representative painting series, From Point (1973–1979) and From Line (1972–1983). Also featured is his iconic Relatum series, exploring the fluid relationship between natural materials like stone and earth and industrial materials like steel and canvas. Notably, the large-scale installation Relatum – The Mirror Road (2016/2023) is juxtaposed with Rembrandt's masterpiece, Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret (1634), from the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Regarding Rembrandt's work, Lee has remarked, “[…] they hold a wondrous glow, not from outside but from within. […] So when I stand before Rembrandt's self-portraits, the very core of my soul trembles.” Constantly reflecting Lee's artistic philosophy throughout, the exhibition examines and challenges the binary distinctions between East and West, nature and artificiality. Lee Ufan continues until April 28, 2024.