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.
 

Yeondoo Jung presents his solo exhibition Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams at the Jeffrey P. Beale Gallery of the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA, USA. Working across various media including photography, video, and sculpture, Jung explores the possibilities for connection amid the anonymity of contemporary urban life. The exhibition features two of his major multipart photographic works: Evergreen Tower (2001) and Bewitched (2001–ongoing).

Upon finishing his studies in London in the early 2000s, Jung returned to Seoul and began exploring the city and its everyday life from a new perspective. He was particularly drawn to the high-rise apartment complexes that define the cityscape—an environment that offers convenience while simultaneously fostering anonymity and isolation. By carefully observing the strangers one might pass in an elevator or on a crowded street, Jung found material for his work in the overlooked stories and unseen possibilities within daily life. Through the medium of photography, he seeks to uncover narratives that lie beneath the surface and to envision the possible futures they imagine.

Evergreen Tower, presented in this exhibition, is a series of family portraits photographed inside the living rooms of 32 households within a single apartment complex in Seoul. As the units share nearly identical floor plans, each home reveals a unique arrangement of daily life, highlighting both the shared structures and the distinct identities of urban households. Meanwhile, Bewitched features individuals around the world, capturing their present lives and imagined futures staged side by side. Ordinary families and individuals collaborate with Jung to express themselves as they are, while also envisioning who they dream of becoming, creating a space where reality and desire intersect. Moving beyond traditional portraiture to visualize the imagined worlds co-created with his participants, Jung transforms personal dreams into staged realities. Bringing together depictions of daily life with the inner wishes of families and individuals, Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams remains on view through January 25, 2026.

The Evanescent and the Eternal, a solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), is currently on view at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, Korea. Marking the artist’s first exhibition in Korea in 25 years and the largest museum retrospective ever organized in the country, the show presents 106 works—spanning painting, sculpture, and installation—of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Bourgeois’s own writings, reflecting her lifelong exploration of memory, the body, and time. Themes of love, fear, abandonment, and the tensions and conflicts within the family—along with the inner fractures born of trauma—permeate her entire body of work. The exhibition captures and mirrors this psychological terrain. Moreover, through the dual concept of “the evanescent and the eternal,” the exhibition captures identities and emotions that waver continually along the boundaries between male and female, past and present, the unconscious and reality.

The exhibition brings together a large body of works, including Bourgeois’s early paintings from the 1940s and the Personages series; the groundbreaking installation The Destruction of the Father (1974), a symbolic stage of imagined revenge against a domineering father figure; the bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri (1968), which merges male and female forms; Red Room (Parents) (1994), one of the most significant works from her Cells series that began in the 1990s; Cell (Black Days), a powerful condensation of melancholy and sexual tension; and her late fabric works, spanning over seven decades of artistic practice.

The exhibition also showcases Bourgeois’s diaries, personal writings throughout her life, and psychoanalytic notes, illuminating the deep connections between her inner psyche and art. It further presents a projection by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, who reinterprets excerpts from Bourgeois’s texts, thereby deepening viewers’ experience of the exhibition. The exhibition runs through January 4, 2026.

Contemporary artist Haegue Yang’s solo exhibition, Haegue Yang: Quasi-Heartland, is currently on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Returning to the American Midwest in nearly 15 years since her 2011 exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, the artist presents a curated selection of sculptures along with a new commission work throughout the museum.

Yang has worked through multifaceted and multidisciplinary installations, dissociating everyday objects and materials—including Venetian blinds, metal bells, artificial straw, and plastic twine—from their mundane roles to recast them in multi-component sculptures or sensory experiences. Especially, the artist, who explores diverse fields spanning art history, political history, and folk culture, offers a fresh reinterpretation of common themes of quasi-migration such as artistic exile, postcolonial diaspora, social mobility, and the liminal space between figuration and abstraction. 

In particular, the large-scale commission work created for the exhibition, Mound Vehicles (2025), reflects the artist’s consistent interest in movement and performativity. Inspired by the form and historical background of CAM’s proximity to Cahokia Mounds, the work pays homage to ancient civilizations and enduring traditions by mimicking the shape of its mounds. Throughout the exhibition period, the work will be activated intermittently to embody and execute its innate mobility.

The exhibition title, Heartland, refers to the central inland region of the United States—areas not adjacent to the Pacific or Atlantic oceans—including the Midwest centered around St. Louis. It conveys both the cultural distinctiveness of the area and the position and identity of the artist as an ”outsider.” Connecting the artist to the landscapes of region and layered history while interweaving the museum’s architecture into the viewer experience, the exhibition runs through Feb 8, 2026.