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.
 

Gala Porras-Kim’s inaugural solo exhibition in Switzerland, The motion of an alluvial record, was recently on view at Kunsthalle Bern. Continuing her long-standing, institutionally critical practice, the artist examines how institutional frameworks define, legitimize, and preserve collections and cultural heritage, and reconceives art as a sensory medium that can be experienced physically, historically, and performatively within climate-controlled institutional environments.

At the center of the exhibition was the installation The motion of an alluvial record, an “atmospheric pavilion” composed of living matter including clay, sediment, and silt collected from the wetlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, placed in conditions of high humidity and heat that reflect the Mayan concept of cyclical time. By artificially recreating a tropical climate within a freestanding wood-and-glass module, the work disrupts conventional museum climate concepts, which typically strive for a controlled, dry environment. Instead, it exposes how environmental control itself reshapes the meaning of objects. The installation also incorporated material traces embedded with institutional histories—such as ash from the fire at the National Museum of Brazil and dust gathered from the Peabody Museum in the United States—highlighting museums not as neutral repositories of knowledge, but as contested sites where multiple narratives intersect.

Through this exhibition, Porras-Kim investigates how the conditions of the white cube and institutional display and preservation logics often strip away cultural and political contexts. Viewing the object not as a static artifact but as living matter, the artist proposes alternative approaches to stewardship that foreground an object’s original functions and cultural presence. In doing so, the exhibition became a space to reconsider how museums construct memory and interpretation, suggesting more open-ended and expansive modes of engaging with cultural heritage.
 

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce that Hyun-Sook Lee, founder and chairperson of the gallery, has been named to this year’s ArtReview Power 100. Since her debut on the list in 2015, this marks her eleventh consecutive nomination, making her the only Korean figure to have achieved this distinction. This recognition underscores Lee’s unparalleled influence across both the Korean and international art landscapes.
First launched in 2002, ArtReview’s annual Power 100, published every December, presents a roster of the one hundred most influential figures in contemporary art. The list is compiled through a rigorous evaluation of candidates’ recent activities and impact. The selected figures span a broad spectrum of roles, including artists and artist collectives, collectors, curators, fair directors, gallerists, museum directors, thinkers, and social activists, reflecting the diverse forces shaping the art world today.
Regarding Lee’s inclusion, ArtReview published the following statement on its official website, highlighting her enduring prominence and contributions to the ever-evolving international art scene:

“Lee has steered Seoul- and Busan-based Kukje Gallery for 43 years now. For a long time, hers was an import business, introducing the likes of Bill Viola and Louise Bourgeois to a South Korean audience. She still shows them (with exhibitions in January and September respectively) and exhibited Gala Porras-Kim for the first time in September, but with international dealers – and collectors – flocking to Seoul, Lee says she is refocusing. ‘[Since foreign artists are receiving greater attention in Korea compared to before] The need to heavily promote foreign artists as we once did has diminished,’ she told The Korea Times. Consequently, the 2025 programme was packed with the likes of Yeondoo Jung, Ahn Kyuchul and a group show of young Korean painters. Not that Lee has ever neglected the domestic scene: she was instrumental in introducing Dansaekhwa globally and she also hung the monochrome paintings of key figure Ha Chong-Hyun in the gallery this year.”

Also featured in this year’s Power 100 is artist Haegue Yang, ranking 38. Yang has received significant recognition both in Korea and internationally, including the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2018); the Republic of Korea Culture and Arts Award (Presidential Citation, 2018); and the 13th Benesse Prize (2022), among others. Recently appointed Chairperson of Kunst-Werke Berlin, Yang continues to bring her sharp insight and distinctive artistic practice to the global contemporary art landscape. She is currently the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich. Yang is also participating in the 15th Shanghai Biennale and preparing to unveil her first large-scale commissioned work at the Taichung Art Museum (TcAM) as part of the TcAM Art Commission. In 2026, Haegue Yang will debut several major projects in the United States. In March, she will present a special collaboration with LA MOCA and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, followed by a solo exhibition in October at Dia Beacon, Haegue Yang: Through, showcasing an ambitious new body of work. Regarding the selection of Haegue Yang, ArtReview commented:

“Leap Year, the retrospective the Seoul- and Berlin-based artist staged last year at the Hayward Gallery in London, travelled to Kunsthal Rotterdam in March and then Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, in September. Yang, however, was already on to her next thing, indicative of the restlessness of an artist whose work encompasses uneasy anthropomorphic sculpture that mines both folk cultures and mass-produced consumables, essayistic video, photography and text. Lost Lands and Sunken Fields opened at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in February, featuring five series of work, not least her new Mignon Votives (2025), small altars made from pinecones and cairns of synthetic stone. Emerging from the institution’s outdoor fountain was the monstrous black plastic twine work The Intermediate – Six-Legged Carbonous Epiphyte Imoogi (2025). With a gallery show at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, and a popup in her former studio in Seoul, too, it’s a wonder Yang decided she has time to chair Kunst-Werke Berlin, the institution responsible for the KW Institute and the Berlin Biennale, a four-year tenure she took up in September.”

Meanwhile, this year’s list includes Ibrahim Mahama, a totemic artist and institution maker, at the top of the list, while Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, chair of Qatar Museums, came second. The full 2025 Power 100 list is available on ArtReview's website (https://artreview.com/power-100/).

Alexander Calder’s solo exhibition High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100, celebrating the centennial of the artist’s formative work Calder’s Circus (1926–31), is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Marking Calder’s first solo exhibition at the museum since its relocation to the Meatpacking District in 2015, the exhibition highlights his early artistic explorations through one of the most iconic and formative works of his career.

During his stay in Paris in 1926, Calder began creating a miniature, multi-act circus composed of figures crafted from everyday materials such as wire, wood, and fabric. Brought to life with lighting, music, and narration, the artist performed Calder’s Circus for nearly two hours to fellow artists and friends, including Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Isamu Noguchi. Calder later packed the completed work into five suitcases, containing figures, props, phonograph records, and repair tools, and continued presenting it across Europe and the United States. The portable and improvisational nature of the Circus embodied ideas of mobility and spontaneity, while the tension and play embedded in the figures’ repetitive motions laid the conceptual groundwork for Calder’s later invention of the mobile.

The exhibition features more than one hundred related objects, including performance ephemera, drawings, models, photographs, and archival film, that recreate the setting in which Calder’s Circus was conceived and performed. These materials illustrate how the work circulated within artistic communities and reveal how its formal and kinetic ideas later developed into the mobiles, stabiles, and wire drawings for which Calder is widely celebrated.

High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 revisits Calder’s Circus not simply as an early experiment but as a formative motif that shaped the artist’s broader sculptural language. Through the circus, Calder dissolved boundaries between entertainment, technology, and art, introducing movement as a defining artistic principle. By tracing the continuity between Calder’s performative work and his later abstract works, the exhibition underscores the circus as the foundation of a kinetic vocabulary that continues to resonate even today. The exhibition is on view through March 9, 2026.
 

Lee Ufan has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Wolfgang Hahn Prize.

The Wolfgang Hahn Prize was established in 1994 to honor and commemorate Cologne-based collector and painting conservator, Wolfgang Hahn (1924–1987), who actively supported the European and American avant-garde movement. The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst (Society for Modern Art) of the Museum Ludwig continues Hahn's legacy as a collector and founding member.

Since its establishment, the Wolfgang Hahn Prize has become one of Europe’s most prestigious art awards. The prize is awarded annually to an artist whose distinguished practice has played a leading role in the development of contemporary art. Lee Ufan is the second Korean artist to receive the honor, following Haegue Yang, who received the prize in 2018.

Lee has long explored the nature of objects and their relationship with the surrounding space while traversing the boundaries between East and West. He was a leading figure in the Mono-ha (School of Things) movement in Japan in the 1960s, which investigated the existence and interrelationships of materials. In the 1970s, Lee also played a significant part in the early formation of Dansaekhwa in Korean contemporary art. His practice centers on the aesthetics of emptiness and the rhythmic placement of bold brushstrokes—dots, lines, and rectangles—within expanses of white space.

This year’s guest juror, Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, commented as follows: “Over the course of [Lee Ufan’s] sixty-year career, he has explored the essential meaning of existence in all relationships that transcend East and West – without following Western modernism or retreating into Eastern spiritual traditions.”
In recognition of the award, Lee Ufan will present an exhibition at the museum from November 7, 2026, through April 4, 2027.
 

Bill Viola, a seminal figure who expanded video into a medium of artistic expression, is featured in the retrospective exhibition Visions of Time at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń and the Tumult Foundation, Poland. Over the course of four decades, Viola has developed a distinctive oeuvre by integrating diverse media, including video, installation, and performance, with philosophical reflections. 

At the forefront of the rise of new media in the late 1970s, Viola traversed the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the material and the immaterial. By removing narratives and characters from the videos, he expanded the medium to explore universal human experiences. In doing so, his works—embracing religious iconography from East and West alongside timeless philosophical contemplation—evoke a sense of déjà vu, simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.

The exhibition features 32 works of his major video installations. The Greeting (1995), which stretches a 45-second moment into 10 minutes of extreme slow motion, delicately captures subtle shifts in gesture, expression, and space as the flow of time becomes distorted. In Room for St. John of the Cross (1983), inspired by the spiritual experience of the 16th-century Spanish saint, St. John of the Cross, Viola amplifies the immersive experience through a minimalistic installation composed of a single window, an earthen floor, a small monitor, and the faint recitation of Spanish poetry. In addition, The Reflecting Pool (1977–1979), Incrementation (1996), and The Messenger (1996) are also on view to trace the artist’s pioneering practice in the course of media art.

This exhibition encompasses Bill Viola's unique visual language, in which video serves not merely as a tool for recording moments but as an expressive medium that transcends the boundaries of reality and time, interlacing surreal visual effects with an organic flow. Visions of Time runs through December 31.