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.