Five museum shows to catch during Seoul's art week

Moon Ki-hoon

From Suh Do-ho's fabric houses and Baselitz's final gold paintings to a posthumous Sol LeWitt, the city's institutions have timed their biggest shows to the September rushFrieze lasts only four days, but the museum shows timed to it run for months, so a short trip is no reason to feel shortchanged.Seoul's institutions save their biggest openings for the first week of September, when collectors and curators are in town. Here are five worth planning a day around after a long afternoon of booth-hopping."Suh Do-ho," MMCA Seoul "Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul" (2024) by Suh Do-ho (MMCA) The biggest of the lot opened Thursday at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in Samcheong-dong: the largest show yet by arguably the most in-demand Korean artist of the moment, featuring more than 500 works.Suh, who grew up in Seoul and has since lived in New York, Berlin and London, is best known for sewing life-size replicas of the homes he has lived in out of translucent polyester, and the national museum has made room for the full range.The gate of his childhood hanok is here; so is a 22-meter installation that links rooms from his homes and studios in Seoul, New York, London and Berlin into one long, walk-through passage. There is also a gallery of early works never shown before, some going back to his student days, along with new pieces made for the show.K-drama star Park Bo-gum narrates the free audio guide, a bonus for the fans. Admission is 8,000 won; open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and until 9 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays."Koo Jeong A: Oussmos," Leeum Museum of Art View of Koo Jeong A's "Land of Ousss [Gravitta]" at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2026, featuring "[EB] Evocative Burst" (2025) (Markus Tretter/Kunsthaus Bregenz) Koo's biggest show in Korea to date is also the hardest to describe in advance, which is part of the appeal. The Seoul-born artist, who represented Korea at the 2024 Venice Biennale, works with things that cannot quite be seen, from scent and magnetism to the vague feeling of a room being slightly off.According to the museum, "Oussmos" starts at the entrance and spills out past its walls, covering the 30-year career of an artist best known abroad for skateparks that glow in the dark.Tickets must be reserved online in advance."Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me," Seoul Museum of Art View of "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me" at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) For a crash course in Korean modernism, the 110th-birthday retrospective at SeMA's main branch near Deoksugung, running since May, offers the most complete account yet of the man often credited as the father of Korean abstraction.Yoo (1916-2002) began experimenting with abstract painting as a student in Tokyo in the 1930s, decades before it caught on at home, and spent the rest of his life painting the mountains of his hometown in flat planes of red, blue and yellow.The show hangs some 170 of his paintings, reliefs, drawings and archival pieces, a number of them never exhibited before. Pianist Son Yeol-eum narrates the audio guide. Admission is free. The museum stays open late, until 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 7 p.m. on weekends, and is closed Mondays."Georg Baselitz," Sehwa Museum of Art View of "Georg Baselitz" at Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul (Hong Chul-ki/Sehwa Museum of Art) The retrospective at Sehwa, inside the Heungkuk Life Insurance building near Gwanghwamun, is the first retrospective anywhere since the late German painter's death in April, and one of the last he planned himself.Forty-six works, 39 of them never before shown in Korea, cover the upside-down figures, the sawed-apart cows of the 1960s and the "Remix" reworkings of his own back catalogue.The final room holds the "Gold Paintings" the artist was still working on from a wheelchair in his final months; the tracks of his walker are visible in the paint. An interview the museum filmed weeks before his death plays alongside them. Rapper Beenzino does the audio guide.Admission is 15,000 won; open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Mondays."Sol LeWitt: Open Structure," Amorepacific Museum of Art Sol LeWitt's "Wall Drawing #770" (Kazuo Fukunaga/Amorepacific Museum of Art) Sol LeWitt, the American artist who helped invent conceptual art in the 1960s, died in 2007, but his work was built to outlive him.His wall drawings exist as written instructions. Each time one is shown, a team of assistants (here, Korean art students) draws it directly on the gallery walls, and when the show closes, it is painted over."Open Structure," in the galleries beneath the Amorepacific headquarters in Yongsan, arrives from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and is his first full-scale exhibition in Korea, with 45 works including 13 wall drawings, from the black-and-white grids of the 1960s to the color-saturated later years.Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Mondays; reservations through the museum's website.What else is in townEs Devlin, the British designer behind the arena tours of Beyonce and Adele, has her first Korean solo show at Futura Seoul through Jan. 17. It takes the form of a mirrored, participatory installation that has visitors drawing, reading and listening together.Centre Pompidou Hanwha, the Paris museum's Seoul outpost that opened in June, is running its inaugural cubism survey through Oct. 4, complete with a section on how the movement reached colonial-era Seoul in the 1920s.