Jean-Michel Othoniel presents a solo exhibition, Beauty Saves the World, at The Wall House Museum in the island of Saint Barthélemy. The exhibition offers an emotional journey encompassing art, nature and spiritual experience, inspired by the natural landscape and light of Saint Barthélemy.

Light, emotion, and travel form the core inspirations of Othoniel’s practice. In particular, light and emotion generated by glass and organic form serve as a kind of ”poetic language,” as Othoniel explains, that “poetry is above all a choice of life and of looking at others around you.” His connection with the island traces back to his first visit, where the force of nature, shifting light, and abundant flora left a lasting mark and resulted in sensations that later became central motifs in his artistic practice.

The Constellation of Pegasus, a permanent installation placed in front of the luxurious hotel Cheval Blanc, embodies the transparency of the night sky and the vastness of constellations. Othoniel articulates his visual vocabulary of flowers, knots, and light through diverse media such as glass, stainless steel, and drawing. In addition, the exhibition features around twenty works, among them pieces rarely shown to the public, and traces the trajectory of his sustained exploration of transformation, fragility, and the beauty of the world.

Beauty Saves the World reflects on how artworks and the architectural space correspond to one another, guiding the visitors to immerse themselves naturally in Othoniel’s universe through shifting currents of light and emotion. The exhibition runs through January 31.
 

Hong Seung-Hye’s project The Painter’s Architecture, The Painter’s Furniture was recently held at the Mezzanine Lounge of Space ZeroOne in Tribeca, New York. Space ZeroOne, established and organized by the Hanwha Foundation, is a non-profit exhibition space that aims to support and introduce contemporary Korean artists. The project was on view simultaneously with the group exhibition Contours of Zero, featuring eight emerging Korean artists whose works explore intersections of technology, materiality, and cultural identity.

Since her solo exhibition Organic Geometry at Kukje Gallery in 1997, Hong has continuously explored the workings of physical space through the language of digital pixels. For the artist, art is inseparable from life, and she seeks to create objects that neither weigh too heavily nor disrupt the flow of everyday reality. Centered on the concepts of “the painter’s architecture” and “the painter’s furniture,” this project embodied her long-standing interest in art that can be used, touched, and inhabited into a spatial experience. The planar structures she designs acquire practical function through optimized volume, transforming geometric abstraction into a lived, functional environment.

These ideas were realized throughout the Mezzanine Lounge, where sofas, chairs, and carpets composed of flat planes of color were arranged across the space. Hong drew attention to the lineage through which geometric abstraction has expanded into social practice via architecture and design, from Vladimir Tatlin to Donald Judd. Soft, plush sofas invite rest, while firmer benches—reminiscent of church seating—encouraged upright posture and reflection. Through this environment, the artist created a space where those who share a belief in the value of art are invited to gather, linger, and exchange ideas.
 

Anish Kapoor’s solo exhibition, Anish Kapoor: Early Works, is currently on view at the Jewish Museum in New York. This is the first presentation at a U.S. museum, providing an in-depth examination of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the boundaries between sculpture, color, and form. As implied by the title, the exhibition showcases 55 works from the 1970s and 1980s, including rare sketches and drawings on paper. 

Anish Kapoor: Early Works focuses on Kapoor’s sculptural practice developed within the contexts of conceptual art and minimalism, examining questions of materiality and existence. After passing through Israel in the early 1970s, Kapoor moved to the United Kingdom to study art, where he gained international recognition through a distinctive formal language. Since he had limited resources to work with, he adopted powdered pigments made from dust gathered from his studio floor to create sculptures. The exhibition reveals the transformation of everyday, non-art materials into new sculptural possibilities. Alongside sculptures, the show also presents early drawings and gouache works. These small-scale works on paper depict subtle, amorphous forms and stand in contrast to his sculptures, while establishing an aesthetic balance between the two media.

The exhibition also places these early works in dialogue with more recent pieces that employ Vantablack, a nanotechnology material that absorbs up to 99.965% of light. Through this juxtaposition, Kapoor continues to investigate the presence and absence of color and the limitations of materiality, which have been a central theme throughout his career. By tracing meaningful continuities from his early experiments to his latest works, the exhibition documents the evolution of Kapoor’s artistic journey and sculptural language.

Organized in conjunction with the Jewish Museum’s reopening, this solo exhibition also reflects on Kapoor’s Jewish identity and artistic origins. By examining the spiritual, psychological, and physical dimensions of sculpture and inviting the audience to experience carefully calibrated spatial relationships in different ways, the exhibition illuminates the foundational investigations that later evolved into Kapoor’s monumental sculptural works.
 

A new project Silentium (Muksiam) by Lee Ufan, one of Korea’s most influential contemporary artists is unveiled in the Heewon Traditional Garden of Hoam Museum of Art in the past November. The title Silentium is derived from the Latin word meaning “silence,” while its Korean counterpart Muksiam (默視庵) means “to gaze quietly.” These intertwined ideas underpin the project, which comprises indoor works as well as outdoor installations.

Three works inside Silentium—Floor Painting, Wall Painting, and Shadow Painting—allude to the transformation and the cyclical flow of life through various media and approaches. Central to Lee Ufan’s practice, the motif of “point,” and the “circles” formed through the infinite expansion of the “points,” and the gradual shifts in color, generate vitality and energy that resonate intuitively and emotionally with the audience. 

Meanwhile, new outdoor installations by the artist are also presented in Yetdol Garden. Three large-scale new works from the Relatum series are installed along a sloping lakeside path, directly responding to the site. As the steel, symbolizing civilization, encounters stone, representing nature, the artistic relationship between the works and the viewers walking through the space emerges organically.

Through the project, Lee Ufan invites viewers to dwell within a “space of silence.” This is his distinctive approach to initiating a dialogue in which the viewers experience the fundamentals of existence shaped through relationships, encounters, resonance, and breath. These newly conceived spaces further deepen and expand the aesthetic of “emptiness” that Lee Ufan has pursued throughout his life.
 

Jae-Eun Choi’s Where Beings Be marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at a public art museum in Korea. On view at the Seoul Museum of Art Seosomun Main Branch (SeMA), the exhibition revisits the interconnectedness between humans and nature that existed long before human civilization, and highlights the artist’s focus on intangible, multi-layered dimensions of time and space, presenting both key works and new pieces.

Organized around five subthemes—Lucy, Tolling Bell, Microcosmos, Names of the Unseen, and Nature Rules—the exhibition traces a temporal continuum from the origins of humanity to the current ecological crisis, offering a comprehensive exploration of human-nature relationships.

The first section, Lucy, features one of the artist’s signature sculptures, which evokes the flow of life and time. The work is inspired by the fossil of the earliest known human named “Lucy,” discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and dating back approximately 3.2 million years. Choi uses stone and structures to reflect the multiplicity of beings that have traversed time.

In Tolling Bell, Choi presents the video series Horizon of the Unanswered, which visualizes nature under threat by juxtaposing images of blackened seas, bleached coral, and rising sea temperatures. At the same time, the work captures sublime landscapes in which beauty persists despite destruction, inviting viewers to experience the majesty of nature even amid ecological crises.

The Microcosmos section shifts focus to the smaller, often overlooked worlds within and beyond the Earth. One of the exhibition’s highlights, World Underground Project, uses washi paper buried in soil across the globe over extended periods. By allowing the earth to inscribe its own temporal and cultural traces onto the paper, the work makes visible the passage of nature and time through a unique material.

Name of the Unseen, as the title suggests, calls attention to the small and seemingly insignificant entities of the natural world. In the series When We First Met, over 560 wildflowers and plants are named and recorded as “portraits,” emphasizing the value of existence and recognizing the quiet presence of life.

Finally, the Nature Rules section revisits works from Choi’s solo exhibition of the same name held at Kukje Gallery in March 2025, including the “DMZ Ecological Forest Plan” and Nature Rules. This section sheds light on life persisting in harsh, war-torn landscapes.

In addition to the artworks, the exhibition presents archival materials that trace the development of Choi’s practice. By questioning human-centered orders and boundaries while foregrounding the sovereignty of nature and living beings, Jae-eun Choi: Where Beings Be offers visitors an encounter with the artist’s powerful yet warm vision towards nature. The exhibition is on view through April 5, 2026.
 

Kukje Gallery opens 2026 with two solo exhibitions in the first half of the year. In the gallery’s Hanok and K3 spaces, Kukje Gallery will present the first solo exhibition in Korea by Korean-Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang. Titled Chora, the exhibition draws on the atmospheric conditions of the Hanok’s inner courtyard—an open void held within architectural borders—as a point of departure, quietly carrying its sensibility into the corresponding site in K3. Known for her sculptural, photographic, and installation-based practice, Kang works with inherently mutable materials, such as surfaces that absorb or reflect light and register shifts in movement. This sensitivity to phenomenology allows her media to remain open to change and continuous transformation. Through this sensibility, she approaches both venues as responsive architectures that shift and echo across distance, where distinctions between interior and exterior, the natural and the constructed blur and intermingle. Her work reflects an ongoing meditation on permeability—of bodies, materials, and spaces—and the drifting formations through which memory and identity continually take shape.

Also, Park Chan-kyong’s solo exhibition Zen Master Eyeball will open in the K1 space. Over the past three decades, Park has examined modernity in Korea and East Asia through an incisive lens, focusing on national division, the Cold War, and vernacular belief systems. The exhibition will bring together more than twenty new paintings, marking a shift from Park’s previous practice centered on writing, photography, film, and installation. By interpreting and appropriating motifs from Korean folk painting and Buddhist temple murals, Park seeks to unsettle the notion of “traditional culture” as something fixed or comfortably contained. Works such as Goransa Temple (2024), Baekyangsa Temple (2025), Zen Master Eyeball (2025), and Zen Master Hyetong (2025) are inspired by visits to various temples and adapted from Seon Buddhist traditions, highlighting the unusual expressions embedded in temple imagery. Themes include fervent longing, the wisdom of “No dependence on words and letters,” and gestures toward transcendence. In his new series including Scroll (2025), Greetings (2025), and Strange Rock Universe (2025), Park departs from the decorative conventions and mannerisms of folk painting to imagine an untamed cosmos filled with animate matter. Park’s new works consciously adopt the formats of Buddhist hanging scroll painting, folk painting, and comics, and deliberately suppress his own artistic signature to give an impression that the works were painted by an anonymous artist. The new works challenge questions of originality, suggesting that it is formed collectively through imageries that have been shared, repeated, and transmitted within a community.

In the meantime, Kukje Gallery will present On the Move, a solo exhibition by Hong Seung-Hye at the Busan space. In her 2023 solo exhibition Over the Layers II in Seoul, the artist signaled a pivotal shift by moving beyond a pixel-based visual language toward more flexible forms of vector graphics. The upcoming exhibition in Busan brings together works that trace her exploration of movement, spanning from her two-dimensional image created in the early 2000s to later developments in animation and performance. The title of the exhibition, On the Move, encapsulates this ongoing focus on transition and flow—not only the continual movement of images within her works, but also the shifts in form, medium, and perceptual sensibility that define her practice. It further reflects the medium of video and its inherent sense of movement, suggesting an open-ended trajectory for the artist’s future developments. This exhibition centers on the “moving image,” a core axis of Hong’s practice. Her geometric forms, conceived on the computer screen, acquire a sense of temporality as they move across the frame, generating sensory and emotional resonance without relying on narrative. The inherent mobility of video and the way it unfolds over time align closely with Hong’s long-standing interest in structure, rhythm, and compositional arrangement. Much like arranging musical notes, she constructs movement through the sequencing of images. The sense of movement, transition, and continual becoming that characterizes her imagery is expected to result in new directions in the exhibition.

In early summer, a solo exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe will take place in Hanok. Celebrated by critics and artists around the world as a master photographer while also bravely standing at the center of various controversies regarding censorship in art, Mapplethorpe traversed a wide range of subjects that defined the late 20th century. From sensuous still lifes to celebrity portraits, his work challenged boundaries, especially in his more graphic works that explored sexuality, which continues to provoke and inspire audiences. This exhibition seeks to move beyond the social reverberations sparked by this collision between art and taboo, focusing instead on his formal genius and artistic voice. Centering particularly on portraiture and still lifes, including his iconic floral images, the exhibition highlights the meticulously framed compositions and exquisite balance that underlie his oeuvre, independent of the timeliness or notoriety of its subjects.

At the same time, Kukje Gallery is excited to present a group exhibition in K1 and K2 curated by Koo Bohnchang, an artist widely celebrated for his instrumental role in shaping the trajectory of contemporary Korean photography. Photography, by its very nature, has always been closely intertwined with technology. Having passed through the era of Photoshop and now entered the age of artificial intelligence (AI), the distinctions between images captured directly through the lens and those manipulated by new technologies have grown increasingly elusive. The exhibition seeks to reaffirm the fundamental importance of observing and recording the world. Centered around traditional still-life works by Korean photographers active since the 2000s, the exhibition shifts its emphasis away from particular photographic techniques and instead focuses on the “lens,” the core component of the camera, as a means of observing objects and exploring their material presence. Featuring works that depict familiar yet quietly enduring subjects, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the ways in which the existence of a thing is revealed, reflecting on new modes of seeing and thinking through the photographic image.

The second half of 2026 begins with a solo exhibition in Busan by Korakrit Arunanondchai, an artist whose practice moves fluidly across video, performance, painting, and installation. Combining a wide range of idioms and materials with remarkable precision, Arunanondchai has consistently posed fundamental questions about existence and meaning—spanning the personal and the collective, life and death, and various systems of belief. The artist has also been active as the co-founder and curator of “Ghost,” a Bangkok-based festival dedicated to video and performance, which concluded its final edition last fall. In his upcoming Busan exhibition, Arunanondchai will revisit the video works he created over the years, using them as a starting point to further explore and expand the possibilities of his deeply personal moving-image language.

In the late summer, the gallery will present a major solo exhibition of Park Seo-Bo, marking the third year since his passing. Spanning the K1, K3, and the Hanok spaces, the exhibition will take the artist’s remark, “If one does not change, one falls. Yet if one changes, one also falls,” as its starting point. Powerfully capturing Park’s philosophy, the statement highlights the painter’s insight that only after years of rigorous discipline could an artist develop their own unique voice. For Park, it was only after he had honed his senses and solidified his convictions that he could introduce a new body of work to the world. His attitude formed the core principle of his artistic universe and the aesthetic ethic that permeated his entire life. Following the arc of transformation from his first Écriture pencil works from 1967 to his final newspaper Écriture series of 2023, the exhibition traces more than fifty years of evolution. Rather than presenting this evolution as a simple chronology of stylistic variations, this comprehensive exhibition will illuminate Park’s “philosophy of change,” exploring how it was shaped by the interplay of thought and body, material and environment, resulting in the many distinctive phases of the artist’s practice. Ultimately, the exhibition will present a poignant meditation on what “change” meant to Park Seo-Bo, and how the combination of discipline and openness became a driving force in his remarkable life.

During this same period, the first solo exhibition of Seeun Kim will open in the K2 space. Kim’s paintings focus on today’s urban environment—an ever-shifting landscape continually reorganized by the forces of economic value and efficiency—and confront the spatial and temporal transformations that inevitably arise within it. In a city where changes outpace one’s ability to form an understanding, the artist examines the countless moments in which individuals are compelled either to adapt or to resist. Kim searches for new visual vocabulary while exploring the questions that emerge from encounters through physical and mental engagements. The recurring systems and rules that constitute the “city in transition” become a crucial medium, through which the artist perceives her own sense of place in society. Within this context, she turns her attention to states that have not yet been defined, consequently creating dynamic compositions through a pictorial language that explores the before-and-after of a cityscape in constant flux.

Towards the end of the year, Kukje Gallery looks forward to hosting a solo exhibition of Jenny Holzer in the Hanok space. For more than four decades, Holzer has used language as her primary medium. It is through incisive aphorisms and poetic texts that she engages with pressing social issues and injustices. The texts she presents compel viewers to confront the social urgencies of their time, creating public spaces that are at once stark and emotional. Her concise, incisive statements, which often prompt reflection of everyday power dynamics, have appeared on surfaces of varied materiality and scale, including LED displays, marble, building facades, and clothing. In this exhibition, situated within the more intimate setting of Hanok, the artist once again invites viewers to read and contemplate political and personal texts at shifting distances as they construct their own sense of balance between the individual and the collective.

Coinciding with the Hanok exhibition, Heejoon Lee will present a solo exhibition of his mixed media works in the K1 and K2 spaces. Closely observing the rapidly accelerating digital environment of contemporary society, Lee explores the role and sustainability of painting, reinterpreting the methodologies of photography and sculpture to depict a range of experiences drawn from urban and architectural spaces. Images of the city collected by the artist’s phone transform into blueprints for painting, using a combination of traditional media and inkjet printing, where his A4-sized black-and-white printouts become the foundation for visualizing a multilayered landscape that encompasses disparate times and spaces. Lee configures these disparate elements on the canvas using a vocabulary of bold lines and circular forms that intersect with strata of accumulated paint and printed imagery. Together, these formal strategies organize his stunning compositions, merging heterogeneous materials with powerful depictions of energy and diverse subject matter.
 

Haegue Yang presents Liquid Votive – Tree Shade Triad (2025, hereafter Liquid Votive) as the inaugural commission for the TcAM Art Commission at the newly-opened Taichung Art Museum within the Taichung Green Museumbrary, Taiwan. Marking the artist’s first major commission in Taiwan and the largest blind installation in her practice to date, the work occupies the museum’s 27-meter-high lobby, suspended from the ceiling in the form of a monumental “cosmic tree.”

For more than two decades, Venetian blinds have served as one of Yang’s core sculptural languages, expanding into performative sculptures and multisensory installations. Through the transformation of an everyday material, the blinds function as mediators of light, transparency, and spatial depth, cultivating an experimental vocabulary that articulates the relationship between movement and perception.

Drawing inspiration from sacred tree traditions in Korea, Taiwan, and other cultural contexts, Liquid Votive expands the imagery of the venerable tree as a site of communal connection and pays homage to spiritual beliefs rooted in nature across regions. Departing from the typical notion of a tree grounded in the earth, the work takes the form of an inverted tree suspended from above. Installed at the center of the museum’s soaring atrium, the structure appears to float midair, rising along the surrounding spiral ramp. The LED lighting and laser beams that animate the work at night are reminiscent of fireflies, imbuing the piece with a sense of vitality. Positioned at the heart of the new institution, the piece activates the space while embodying aspirations for collective cohesion and spiritual resonance.

Yi-Hsin Lai, director of the Taichung Art Museum, remarks, “Haegue Yang is the ideal artist to illuminate the relationship between artwork and architectural space. Her work engages not only with the elegant interior ramp but also with the museum’s natural and cultural values, offering visitors a distinctive artistic and sensory experience.” The work will remain on view for the next two years.