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.