Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its exhibition schedule for 2025. The gallery’s program will commence with solo exhibitions dedicated to two artists who hold significant positions in the Korean art scene, starting from March 20, 2025. Seoul's K2 and K3 spaces will present a solo exhibition of the Korean contemporary artist Jae-Eun Choi, who has produced a rich body of works embodying her interest in nature as the source of life since as early as 1986, where she carried out a project involving burying pieces of paper in the ground as a means of materializing communication with the soil. In the spring of the new year, the gallery seeks to address urgent questions concerning the ecosystem through Choi’s work. The exhibition will highlight Choi’s lyrical landscape of nature comprising paintings based on natural elements of the forest and photographs that record real-time portraits of the sky, as well as the DMZ project that she has developed since 2015. As part of the agenda launched under the title of “Nature Rules,” the project promotes the restoration of the ecosystem within the DMZ based on “DMZ Ecological Forest Plan” produced by Choi. The exhibition plans to offer a closer look into her artistic method undertaken in the project. 

Concurrently, in March, the gallery will present a solo exhibition of Ha Chong-Hyun. In October of 2024, Art Sonje Center held a symposium dedicated to Ha as a preliminary research initiative for his upcoming solo exhibition at the institution, slated to open in 2025. As discussed through multidisciplinary perspectives at the symposium, Ha’s early works emerged out of dynamic experiments that unfolded in conjunction with the vicissitudes of a transformative era in Korea. Meanwhile, in the spring, Kukje Gallery will showcase Ha’s latest works. The exhibition will offer insights into the artistic practice of Ha, whose various experiments with materiality shaped his pictorial grammars that culminated in the artist’s singular method of the “bae-ap-bub” technique. By introducing Ha’s depiction of the field of contemporary painting, the exhibition aims to illuminate his prolific career as an artist who has forged a pioneering path in Korean modern and contemporary art.

In late April, the gallery’s Busan outpost will present Yeondoo Jung’s first solo exhibition in the region, The Inevitable, Inacceptable, the artist’s first solo show with the gallery after the 2008 presentation in Seoul. In this exhibition, Jung explores the mischiefs of life, where things do not go as planned and acceptance becomes the only choice, presenting them through his unique perspective. Much like how blues music addresses sadness and self-pity while offering the solace of “it’s okay,” Jung embraces everyday challenges not with excuses but with self-mocking yet whimsical and delightful imagination. The artist visualizes ordinary ironies—things difficult to put into words, events that defy common sense, attempts that never seem to work, desires that could only be earnest wishes, and happenings that are bound to turn out as they did—into videos, sculptures, and drawings. The musical expressions and contingency found in the works are linked to the artist’s interpretation of ‘healing’ and ‘yearning,’ as this exhibition once again highlights Jung’s artistic talent of easing weight with lightness.

In June, Kukje Gallery’s K1 and K3 spaces in Seoul will present Painting after Painting (working title), a group exhibition of young painters organized by curator Sunghui Lee from HITE Collection. The exhibition addresses how young painters diagnose and explore symptoms of the era, engage with personal narrative and identity, as well as reflect socio-political sensibility in their work vis-à-vis the overflow of images and dismantled boundaries between mediums in contemporary art. The contested terrains of contemporary society confronting diverse concerns—including the rapid scientific and technological development, climate crisis, warfare, socio-political conflict and inequality, and gender issues—are fully reflected and refigured in the artists’ work. Informed by globalized visual experiences and sensitivities, today’s artists have referenced, appropriated, and re-interpreted a range of sources assembled across the era. In particular, as users of digital media, they translate visual language and sensory experience influenced by the Internet and social media through painterly means, while flexibly incorporating the breakdown of traditional boundaries between mediums into their work through multidisciplinary experiments.

In June, Kukje Gallery presents a group exhibition curated under the theme of “tradition” in its Hanok space. The Hanok building is the smallest in scale among the gallery’s exhibition spaces, but is located at the center of the gallery campus; perhaps as if tradition stays at the periphery of contemporary art but could be standing at the center of it, depending on the viewpoint. Starting from such a vantage point, the exhibition groups together the techniques that we had thought were lost in history, the ideologies that have quietly been embedded into contemporary every day, and the tales that have been forgotten. The presentation seeks to be an experimental platform portraying how tradition stays vibrantly alive today at the center of contemporaneity, shed of the layers of cliché that are easily associated with the notion of it.

In fall of 2025, Kukje Gallery's Seoul spaces will be dedicated to the solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Recognized as one of the most influential artists of the past century, Louise Bourgeois worked in various media throughout her 70-year-long career, including drawing, sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, and performance to produce a highly original vocabulary of forms. Her central themes are the fear of abandonment, sexuality, identity, and the relationship to the Other.

The season will also showcase the gallery’s first exhibition with Gala Porras-Kim. Persistently questioning the system of narrating and interpreting history, Porras-Kim pays attention to how intangible legacies are defined and regulated by artificial layers of contexts. The artist’s intervention into numerous institutions’ collections around the world brings forth new dialogue of ownership and intent. With this exhibition in Korea, Porras-Kim visualizes the arbitrary convention of assigning meaning to nature as a means of seeking to understand and control it.

Kukje Gallery also presents its first exhibition with painter Jang Pa. Frequently introduced as the “female grotesque,” Jang Pa’s work actively subjectifies and visualizes the senses that have historically been Otherized for being categorized as feminine. Here, the artist joyfully breaks free of the long history of violence embedded in the perspective of either denigrating the female body as inferior or objectifying it as something to be worshipped. Her first exhibition with Kukje Gallery will provide the audience a glimpse into the grammar of humor embraced within the women’s bodies and organs painted by Jang Pa, while also narrating the process of how the painter recontextualizes the numerous images and symbols of women that have been employed in various cultures throughout different layers of time and space around the world.

For the final project of the year 2025, Kukje Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Daniel Boyd. Grounded on the research on his own home ground roots, Boyd questions and challenges the preexisting romanticist notions dominated by the Eurocentric narration of history and seeks to restore the perspectives that are overlooked in such hegemonic historical discourse. His work cultivates a multiplicity of perspectives as the work itself defers any immediate delivery of a singular meaning. Likening the gaps of information that are generated in this process to the notion of darkness, the artist invites the viewers to fill and enlighten the dark void of the unknown with each of our knowledge and different backgrounds, leading the paintings to new horizons of meaning.

Hyun-Sook Lee, founder and chairperson of Kukje Gallery, has been nominated on ArtReview’s Power 100 list, as announced by the British contemporary art magazine on December 5, 2024. Since Lee’s initial appearance on the list in 2015, this year marks her 10th consecutive year of being named on the Power 100, making her the only Korean to achieve this distinction and solidifying her unparalleled influence across both the Korean and international art scenes. Since 2002, ArtReview has been presenting the Power 100 list, an annual roster of the most distinguished figures in the international art scene, selected through a thorough analysis of their recent activities and impact in the industry. Panelists and collaborators have helped ArtReview construct the list, consisting of artists and artist collectives, collectors, curators, fairs, galleries, museum directors, thinkers, and social movements. Ranking 96 on the list, ArtReview published the following statement on their official website, underscoring her enduring prominence and contribution to the ever-shifting global landscapes of contemporary art:

“By spearheading the international positioning of a group of Kukje Gallery’s artists, including Ha Chong-Hyun, Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, Lee turned the Dansaekhwa movement into an art historical period that could be digested by foreign audiences. Lee’s approach, which has focused on organising prominent international exhibitions, including collateral shows at the Venice Biennale, made their name – as well as her own. Now that Seoul has become a major node in the art market, Lee, whose gallery was founded in 1982 and represents approximately 50 artists, including Haegue Yang and the newly signed eighty-nine-year-old sculptor Kim Yun Shin (featured in this year’s Venice Biennale), is more ambivalent about how helpful artworld hype can be. ‘I think we should not be “too excited” about the Korean art scene being globally recognized, becoming another art hub in Asia… Both galleries and artists should stay on their toes,’ she warned The Korea Herald. Now a family affair, with Lee’s children involved, Kukje is no doubt in it for the long haul.”

Along with Hyun-Sook Lee, artist Haegue Yang has joined this year’s Power 100 roster, ranking 48. ArtReview commented: “A collection of venetian blinds were at the centre of Yang’s recent solo exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. This staple object, used by the artist for nearly 20 years, framed a videowork in which she revisits the abandoned house that served as the venue for her first solo exhibition in South Korea in 2006. Featuring an installation formed from drying racks, origami pieces and light fixtures, that historic – and self-initiated – show set the tone for a career in which the architectural detritus of the everyday has been used to poetically reference art historical moments, political events or folk rituals. The Hayward exhibition garnered a one-star review in The Guardian but plenty of praise elsewhere: Yang’s fans are legion, demonstrated by the fact that the London exhibition wasn’t her only museum outing this year. She received a survey show, titled Flat Works, of collages, prints and paintings spanning two decades at the Arts Club of Chicago, and was included in the Lahore Biennale as well as group exhibitions at Secession, Vienna, and MoMA, New York, among others."

Meanwhile, fellow Korean luminaries from this year’s list include Doryun Chong, Chief Curator of M+, Hong Kong, listed at 30, together with the museum’s director, Suhanya Raffel; and the South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and academic Byung-Chul Han, who continues his tenure as professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, placed 39. Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Biennial and founder of the Sharjah Art Founddation, topped the list, while Rirkrit Tiravanija, who was already listed as the number 3 in the 2023 Power 100 list, came second. The rest of the 2024 Power 100 list can be viewed on ArtReview's website (https://artreview.com/power-100/).

Contemporary artist Haegue Yang’s solo exhibition, Haegue Yang: Flat Works, is currently on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. Delving into the two-dimensional works that Yang has explored for over the past three decades, the exhibition identifies underlying connections and motivations across the artist’s oeuvre through a select number of key flat works, offering a scholarly perspective on this aspect of Yang’s career for the first time.

While Yang's flat series has often been presented as a complementary element alongside her installations featuring blinds or metal bells, this marks the first exhibition where her two-dimensional works take center stage. The exhibition includes fifty-eight works from seven different series: Hardware Store Collages, Lacquer Paintings, Non-Foldings, Trustworthies, Wallpapers, Spice Prints, Vegetable Prints and Mesmerizing Mesh, which is based on the research of paper props used in shamanistic practices internationally.

The artist has long investigated the notion of flatness as a process of ‘compressing’ three-dimensional world into two-dimensional images. To the artist, the ‘flatness’ refers to something that is folded and condensed but retains the potential to unfold again, embodying a substantial amount of tangible and intangible space within. This understanding of flatness forms the foundation of the diverse series presented in this exhibition, showcasing a range of works from minimalist and discrete to maximalist and engulfing.The exhibition continues until December 20.

Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful., a retrospective exhibition of the French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois is currently on view at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Marking the largest retrospective of the artist's work in Japan in 27 years, the exhibition presents more than 100 works in a variety of media, spanning from sculpture, painting, drawing, fabric, to installation, highlighting the artist's entire oeuvre.

The exhibition is organized into three chapters. The first chapter, “Do Not Abandon Me,” presents works that address the ambivalence and complexity of motherhood, including the sculpture Nature Study (1984), and explores the theme of abandonment anxiety that has both haunted the artist throughout her life and served as an artistic inspiration throughout her practice. The second chapter, “I Have Been to Hell and Back,” deals with the negative emotions that have dominated Bourgeois’ life: anxiety, guilt, suicidal impulses, murderous hostility, fear of intimacy and dependency, and fear of rejection. In particular, the installation The Destruction of the Father (1974), exhibited in this chapter, captures the fantasy of revenge against a domineering father. Finally, the last chapter, “Repairs in the Sky,” examines how Bourgeois’s art restored the precarious balance between the conscious and unconscious, maternal and paternal, past and present in a balanced perspective. The installation Clouds and Caverns (1982–1989) offers a glimpse into the complexity of human anxiety and inner emotions.

The exhibition exemplifies how the artist sublimated her childhood experiences into art, showcasing paintings and videos that have never been shown in Japan, including the iconic sculpture Maman (1999). The exhibition runs through January 19, 2025.

Korean contemporary artists Kyungah Ham and Haegue Yang are currently participating in the group exhibition Forms of the Shadow at the Secession and the Korean Cultural Centre in Vienna, Austria. Curated by Sunjung Kim, Artistic Director of the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, the exhibition features 18 artists (individuals and collectives), exploring the "shadows" cast over contemporary life, including the pandemic, climate crisis, and geopolitical tensions that can be witnessed globally. The exhibition reflects on the human existence in the 21st century and captures a portrait of our time.

As part of the Vienna Secession movement that emerged in the late 19th century, the institution was inaugurated by artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, championing the progressive art since its founding in 1897. Operated by artists, the Secession embraces the motto “To each era its art. To art its freedom,” and has been actively engaging with cultural and social issues, as well as contemporary societal and political matters, fostering discourse through art. This exhibition aligns with the institution's art-historical and historical contexts, emphasizing the complexities of the era contemporary people face while highlighting hopeful solidarity, showing that despite these complexities, we are all interconnected.

Kyungah Ham presents her large-scale embroidery painting series What You See Is Not What You See/Chandeliers for Five Cities (2014–16), featuring an image of a grand chandelier. The sparkling lights of the chandelier are obscured by its swinging movements, suggesting paradoxical relationships surrounding the imperfections of great power or ideology, and the ongoing conflicts that prevail. The delicate stitches, each one a pixel, encapsulate the hidden presence of North Korean embroidery artisans, symbolizing the suffering of those living through the history of separation.
Haegue Yang, on the other hand, showcases her blind installation Fatal Love (2008/2018), which abstractly captures the tragic ending of Petra Kelly, the founder of the German Green Party and environmental activist, and her partner Gert Bastian, a former NATO military commander. Through Kelly’s narrative, the artist interweaves personal, historical, and political circumstances, suggesting the complexities of human existence through multiple layers of context surrounding a single individual.

In light of the two World Wars and the Cold War of the 20th century, as well as the ongoing war in Ukraine that continues to raise concerns about further escalation, and the pressure from the rise of far-right movements in Austria, the exhibition illuminates a global sense of community that spans past and present, East and West. The exhibition runs until November 17.

Contemporary artist Ahn Kyuchul’s solo exhibition Ahn Kyuchul: Questions — Landscape without Horizon is currently on view at Space ISU in Seoul. The exhibition presents a diverse group of works in various media, including installation, sculpture, painting, and text, that explores fixed ideas and conventions that have persisted in our society today. For the past four decades, the artist has been raising questions about life and the world that surrounds us, taking his detailed observations of everyday life and objects as a point of departure. The exhibition introduces eight new works that reflect these questions he has been pursuing concerning visual art.

The exhibition invites viewers to step into a “landscape without horizon,” encouraging them to consider their own answers to the questions that the artist poses. New works featured in the show include Spiral Wall, which draws viewers in like a black hole, yet its endless rotation prevents them from reaching its center; Dot Practices, which showcases the artist’s intense effort to emulate a minimalist masterpiece with a single dot; Line Practices, that captures the artist’s experimentations to find various ways to draw lines without a ruler; On the Way to Art, that serves as a signpost for seekers of true art; Tilted Seascapes, which suggests a way to adjust three tilted sea painting, and Seven Boxes, in which each box holds the key to another box that doesn't fit, and the whole cannot be understood without opening them all. These works reconstruct the landscape of our time in which the “horizon” has been lost. The exhibition is on view until January 3, 2025.

Michael Joo is participating in the group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, USA. The exhibition features over 100 artworks by 25 international artists, exploring the climate crisis and other human-caused disasters that humanity faces all together.

For the exhibition, Michael Joo collaborated with digital artists Danil Krivoruchko and Snark.art to create a collection of NFTs modelled after the crystalline structure of coral reefs. The algorithms and 3D printing technology utilized for the works have since been put to practical use by researchers at the University of Hawai’i for the research on the development of fish species that inhabit the coral reef. This process illustrates how art and science can be interwoven together in order to address and solve the current environmental issues.

The exhibition spotlights transdisciplinary practices that encompass diverse media, including painting, photography, multimedia, augmented reality (AR), and even living organisms to address the climate crisis, challenge anthropocentric thinking, and present a worldview that moves beyond hierarchical structures to envision all elements of nature as a whole rather than as materials for use and exploitation by humankind. The exhibition continues through January 5, 2025.