Eliana Willis

As of this month, four otherworldly sculptures by South Korea’s most infamous artist watch over Fifth Avenue from the niches along the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s forward-facing exterior, marking the first major U.S. showcase by Lee Bul in over 20 years. Their silhouettes both contradict and complement the Met’s limestone Beaux-Arts facade, enticing viewers to contemplate the catch-22 of progress.
“I can’t really speak for other institutions,” said Lesley Ma, the Met’s first-ever curator of modern and contemporary Asian art, who helped oversee Lee’s commission, Long Tail Halo. “But the reason that we chose her is that she’s one of the most celebrated sculptors of her generation.”
“Later, I found out that she knew about the facade commission,” Ma added, “and was hoping that she would be invited one day.”
The Met, featuring four new sculptures by Lee Bul. Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Lee, 60, achieved notoriety during her twenties for performances like Sorry for Suffering – You think I’m a puppy on a picnic (ca. 1980s–90s) and Abortion (1989), wherein she traipsed Seoul in a tentacled costume and hung from the ceiling of Dongsoong Art Center discussing her own terminated pregnancy, respectively. The latter stunt only concluded after attendees insisted Lee be taken down from her harness, which was causing her obvious pain.
From there, Lee moved into sculptures, like Majestic Splendor—a frequently re-staged installation of bagged fish that filled the MoMA with a putrid odor in 1997 debut—and her Cyborgs of the same decade, which explored the tensions between people and technology through partial, pristine, sexy half robots made from silicone, polyurethane, and paint.
Lee Bul, CTCS #1 (2024). Photo by Eugenia BurnettTinsley. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“In the mid 2010s she kind of shifted her perspective into the larger narration of history,” Ma noted. Lee’s sculptures exploded into her now-recognizable style of meticulous, many-faceted amalgamations. Her “Secret Sharer” series, which translates the shape of man’s cross-cultural best friend through this approach, debuted at her 2011 retrospective in Tokyo. Canines surface twice in her latest commission for the Met, too.
Long Tail Halo is the fifth installment in the Museum’s facade series, which Wangechi Mutu inaugurated in 2019. Lee’s edition is the first since auto company Genesis started sponsoring it. Much like Mutu and British-Guyanaese artist Hew Locke, Lee drew inspiration directly from the Met’s collection for her turn in the niches. But, instead of putting a new spin on the past or interrogating the present, Lee looks towards the future.
Lee Bul, The Secret Sharer II (2024). Photo by Eugenia BurnettTinsley. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Two different shapes appear here: two proud humanoid forms, and two crouching canines. The taller figures flank the Met’s doors, while the dazzling dogs perch on the outskirts, purging crystals into the fountains—a serendipitous alignment that even Lee didn’t foresee, according to Ma.
All four sculptures tessellate mesmerizing planes of EVA or polycarbonate parts over steel armatures. Although the niches do offer a bit of protection from the elements, it helps that Lee has built a practice off such durable, industrial materials. And while scores of artists typically send the designs for their public artworks out for fabrication, Lee handcrafted these sculptures with the help of about a dozen assistants in her Seoul studio, piecing them together atop underlying skeletons of woven stainless steel that resemble artworks in their own right, if only viewers could see them.
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, conceived in 1913, cast in 1972. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
During the day and a half-long Met visit that kickstarted Lee’s conceptualization, she was struck by the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger, as well as Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). A show of Louise Bourgeois’s oft-overlooked paintings depicting human forms arising from architectures—much like Lee blends the figurative with the abstract, and the human with the non human—also struck her.
These disparate artistic influences clearly manifest amongst Long Tail Halo. Mixed together, though, they blend into a classical beauty that, at times, echoes the likes of Lady Liberty.
Long Tail Halo encompasses Lee’s fortes—her command over material, her taste for allure, and her ability to toe the line between utopia and dystopia. Their striking appearance invites guests and pedestrians alike to slow down, take a closer look, and perhaps even pause for a second thought, before returning to progress’s inexorable pull.
“Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave, New York, through May 27, 2025. More

Few artists have a biography as varied as Nathan Myhrvold. The photographer, scientist, chef, and author of the award-winning Modernist Cuisine cookbooks opened his first New York City solo show this week inside—appropriately—a delicious Japanese restaurant.
When I asked him to define himself, Myhrvold told me it depended on the context. “I go to dinosaur conferences, and when I’m there, I would describe myself as a paleontologist.
I do research in astronomy and when I go to those things, I am an astronomer. And when I am talking to people at my art galleries or doing an interview like this, I’m an artist.”
Myhrvold, age 65, got a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at New Jersey’s Princeton University and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking. Next, he cofounded a computer start-up that Microsoft purchased in 1986. He worked for the company for 13 years, serving as its first chief technology officer before retiring in 1999.
Now, “Intention and Detail” at the Gallery, a Japanese restaurant and art gallery from chef Hiroki Odo, is Myhrvold’s first formal art exhibition. (He’s shown his photographs at museums before, but at institutions dedicated to science, not art.)
Nathan Myhrvold, Yumepirika, a photo of premium Japanese white rice grown by Mr. Tomo. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
Odo opened his namesake Flatiron District restaurant in late 2018, earning two Michelin stars and an effusive three-star New York Times review. There’s a bar called Hall in front of the kaiseki dining counter, and a speakeasy lounge tucked in back. In 2021, Odo expanded next door with the Gallery, as a means of combining his passion for art and design with his love of the culinary world.
Myhrvold, with his specialty of food photography, was a natural fit for the space—although when the chef reached out about the possibility of a show, he did have some notes.
“Nathan Myhrvold: Intention and Detail” at the Gallery by Odo, New York. Photo by Olive Mirra/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
“He said, ‘I love your photographs, but you don’t have all that much Japanese food or Japanese ingredients.’
So I said, ‘well, I can fix that,’” Myhrvold said.
Already planning a photography trip to Borneo from his home in Seattle, it was easy for Myhrvold to extend a layover in Japan. On the outskirts of Tokyo in Minato, he spent a day documenting the production of mame daifuku, a traditional Japanese dessert of red bean paste wrapped in mochi, made from pounded rice, at Matsushimaya. Myhrvold wanted to celebrate the craft of old-fashioned production processes still in use in Japan, which, despite modernization, boasts many businesses that are hundreds of years old.
“It was fascinating to see them work. There are machines for a couple of things, like pounding the rice, but for almost everything else, they do it all by hand,” he recalled, noting that the trickiest thing about the shoot was simply finding a good vantage point to take photos in the business’s tight, efficiently organized quarters.
Nathan Myhrvold taking one of his frozen-motion photographs of wine. Photo courtesy of the Cooking Lab, LLC.
Back in Seattle, where he runs the Cooking Lab, the culinary research and development lab that self-publishes his books, Myhrvold also took photos under the microscope of typical Japanese ingredients. There are larger-than-life shots of sesame seeds, bonito flakes, shiso leaves, the adzuki beans used to make the mame daifuku filling, and even a special kind of premium rice that sells for $50 a pound.
“I like to literally focus on food, to look at food in microscopic detail, and to show the beauty that’s there that most people don’t even see,” he said, pointing out the different pink and yellow colors that magically emerge when you zoom in on a seemingly black sheet of nori seaweed.
“It turns out shiso leaf is also really beautiful,” Myhrvold added. “The architecture of the leaf has these veins that branch out. But there’s also these little droplets on the underside of the leaves that actually contain the flavor oil that makes shiso what it is, and they look like clear resin and little bits of the jewel amber.”
Nathan Myhrvold, Shiso. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC
In the exhibition, these magnified images are displayed on a monumental scale, printed on archival paper. The result is something more akin to abstract art, with an intriguing, alien-like beauty totally absent from photographs one might take of their brunch order to share on Instagram.
The celebration of these ingredients is amplified when paired with Odo’s cooking, which is about as delicious as you would expect coming out of a two-Michelin-star kitchen. I went to the space to experience both the art and the food, and ordered the tasting menu.
Courses included a jewel box-like tray of sushi, a trio of delicately breaded and fried kushi-age skewers, and an ingenious shabu shabu, in which the guest cooks mushrooms and thin slices of beef themselves in a delicious broth heated over a flame in what appears to be a coffee filter. Any one of the dishes would have been worthy of appearing alongside the art on the gallery walls.
Nathan Myhrvold, Adzuki. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
Myhrvold has been a photographer since childhood, and spent years in the darkroom developing large format film—especially as his day job at Microsoft allowed him to afford more expensive cameras and equipment. And while he was at the tech giant, Myhrvold took a leave of absence to study at culinary school in France. It was an experience that presaged his next act, as an acclaimed cookbook author, focusing on what’s popularly known as molecular gastronomy.
In 2005, he began working on the six-volume, 2,400-page opus that became Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (2011). It won the 2012 James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook of the Year award. Modernist Bread followed in 2017, and Modernist Pizza in 2021. (Next up will be a book on pastry.)
The Modernist Cuisine books. Photo courtesy of the Cooking Lab, LLC.
For each book, Myhrvold not only meticulously tested a multitude of different cutting-edge cooking techniques and the science behind them, but photographed every step of the way. That led to two books specifically focused on his art: Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013) and Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography (2023).
Those stunning images seemed almost magical in their ability to capture the act of cooking in gorgeous detail. Many feature appliances and cookware sliced in half to present a unique cross section view. All were shot with custom-built cameras.
A photo of broccoli from Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (2011). Photo by Nathan Myhrvold, courtesy of the Cooking Lab.
“I build all of the equipment, and to me that is a way of both increasing the technical quality of the photos, but also it’s my homage to the discipline,” Myhrvold said.
Super high shutter speeds and specially-designed robotic rigs allowed him to capture fleeting moments—like sabering open a champagne bottle or spilling a glass of wine—in ultra crisp, high-resolution images.
A photo of wine spilling from Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography (2023). Photo by Nathan Myhrvold, courtesy of the Cooking Lab.
“We’re only just now getting very fast shutter speeds with the latest set of digital cameras—for a long time, the fastest would be a thousandth of a second.
And that’s way too slow.
You get a blur. So my flashes are 160 thousandths of a second,” Myhrvold said.
“We all spill wine.
But it happens so fast you can’t realize how beautiful it is when it occurs. It looks like some crazy glass sculpture from Murano in Venice or from Dale Chihuly or something,” he added.
”It’s amazing-looking, but with our normal human senses we can’t see it.
So these photos are a way in which I can show you a vision of food you haven’t seen before.”
Installation view of “Nathan Myhrvold: Intention and Detail” in the lounge space at the Gallery by Odo, New York. Photo by Olive Mirra/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
Achieving such images—a selection of which are on view in the Odo lounge space—is not without its potential downsides, Myhrvold warned: “When you do these splash shots, you wind up just getting soaked in wine. When you drive home, you better not get stopped by the cops, because they’re going think you’re drunk no matter what you say, because you just reek!”
But while the process might be messy, the results are so beautiful that fans of the cookbooks soon began inquiring about whether prints were for sale. (Myhrvold’s new series of 10 large-format artist proofs is priced at $17,500 each, as is the full set of 12 mame daifuku photos.)
Nathan Myhrvold, Kuromai. A photo of black “Forbidden Rice” taken under a microscope. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
After his success in self-publishing—the book no publisher dared to take a chance on went on to sell 300,000 copies, despite a $600 price tag—Myhrvold saw no reason not to open his own art gallery as well.
Today, the Modernist Cuisine Gallery has spaces in New Orleans and La Jolla, San Diego, and is looking to expand to Miami. (Outposts in Las Vegas and Myhrvold’s hometown of Seattle have since shuttered.) But the New York show should help bridge the gap between art, science, and the culinary world for an artist, scientist, and chef whose work does just that.
“Nathan Myhrvold: Intention and Detail” is on view at the Gallery by Odo, 17 West 20th Street, New York, New York, September 24–November 3, 2024. More

The single best thing that I saw during Frieze Seoul?
A friend asked me right when I got back to New York earlier this month, and I had to stop and think. There were too many highs, too many surprising delights. There was a great deal of dross, too. (What art week doesn’t have that?) But the third edition of Frieze had the capital city, and South Korea as a whole, in peak condition. Galleries and museums staged ambitious shows and stayed open late. Smart, tough editions of revered biennials awaited further down the peninsula, in Busan and Gwangju. The festivities felt more cohesive than those of Frieze’s first two outings. The mood was giddy, buoyant, precarious.
Best in show at Frieze was in the booth of New York’s Tina Kim Gallery: This 9-feet-tall painting of beskirted legs from 2001–04 by the superb Kang Seok Ho, who died in 2021, only 50. Alluring, surreal, intimate, and strange.
Sure, huge deals were not getting done at Frieze and the homegrown Kiaf at the Coex convention center, but art was selling, and people were having a ball. Art was everywhere, corporate tie-ins were everywhere, and the parties just kept coming.
On the opening night of the fairs, you could venture north of the Han River to the Samcheong neighborhood, which is home to some veteran blue-chip firms, and find hundreds of people perched on plastic stools in Kukje Gallery’s capacious courtyard. The revelers were eating fried chicken and swilling beer from a row of taps (an act of generosity hard to imagine in New York), then visiting punchy solo shows by Kyungah Ham and Michael Joo that are open through November 3.
At Gallery Shilla, the chickens just kept coming.
Gallery Shilla termed its event “The Night of 100 Chickens,” and offered to all comers heavenly roasted birds from the back of a truck. It was toasting a show by the Mono-ha sculptor Kishio Suga titled “20 Years” (which is how long he’s worked with Shilla). The centerpiece of the affair, which runs through October 19, is Multiple Existence (2014), a circle of short cement columns topped with black rocks—a kind of room-sized Stonehenge, enigmatic and powerful, with a small opening for you to enter.
Yoo Youngkuk, Work (Terra Firma), 1964, at PKM Gallery. Buy some for your local museum.
Meanwhile, PKM Gallery had DJs and drinks for its radiant exhibition of the Korean modernist Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002), “Stand on the Golden Mean” (through October 10). Yoo made hard-edge abstractions that pull their power from the natural world. They are bracingly succinct. Until last year, when Pace did a New York show, he had never had a solo show beyond Korea. Now there’s a collateral event at the Venice Biennale. Everyone should know him.
An untitled work by John Pai from the 1980s at Gallery Hyundai.
Like Kukje, Gallery Hyundai was hosting a doubleheader—the intricate abstract sculptures of the Korean American octogenarian John Pai in one of its buildings (through October 19) and a show in partnership with the esteemed Los Angeles outfit Commonwealth and Council in the other. The collabo, “Open Hands,” ran only two weeks (through September 15), which is a shame because it had some gems, like a pair of boots bearing carved Crocs, both carved from wood, a piquant display of taste and ornamentation by Eusung Lee.
Eusung Lee’s Dandelion Acceleration (2020) in “Open Hands,” a collaborative show between Gallery Hyundai and Commonwealth and Council.
One hub of activity that night was the main location of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), where the (toothsomely named) duo Kimchi and Chips used 33 laser projectors to create an artificial purple moon outside. (See the image up top.)
Inside, the MMCA was inaugurating “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists,” easily the most divisive show in town, with some 130 works by more than 50 modern and contemporary figures from around a dozen countries. Complaints I heard: the installation is too jam-packed (certainly true), the selection of names is a bit random, and the premise is retrograde.
Lee Bul’s Monster: Pink (1998/2011) next to a trinity of drawings by Guo Fengyi in “Connecting Bodies” at the MMCA’s main Seoul branch.
That’s all fair enough, but it is impossible for me to begrudge a show with major pieces by, among many others, Guo Fengyi (her frenetic drawings of spectral beings are paired with a monstrous sculpture by Lee Bul), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Pacita Abad, and Atsuko Tanaka, particularly when many of those pieces have rarely or never been seen in Korea.
One of the breakout hits of the week: “Jung Youngsun: For All That Breathes on Earth” at the MMCA
The MMCA also delivered one of the sleeper hits of the week, a survey of the landscape architect Jung Youngsun, “For All That Breathes on Earth,” which just closed. Yung, who is 63, was the first woman licensed as a land-development engineer in South Korea, and she has helmed an astonishing number of landmark public projects in the country. They include the Gyeongchun Line Forest Trail in Seoul, an almost 4-mile-long park built along a decommissioned rail line (it’s like a street-level High Line that cuts through the city: tranquil, popular, and judiciously paced), and the traditional garden at Samsung’s Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin (where Nicolas Party now has a show).
A little garden respite designed by Jung Youngsun as part of her show at the MMCA.
Presenting massive outdoor works in a museum is obviously not simple, but curator Lee Jihoi managed it, in high style, by arraying photos, models, drawings, and videos throughout the galleries, including some underfoot. A sense of plentitude—of sharp, restrained ideas, well-executed—prevailed. In a museum courtyard, Jung created a rustic environment to offer a taste of her light touch and respect for the natural world. “I hope that the gardens we tender, stroke, and nurture will be a source of inspiration and a moment of healing and recovery for all,” she once said. Those are words to live by.
Park Rehyun’s Woman (1942) in “Turbulent Times” at the Seoul Museum of Art.
The MMCA was just one of three major institutions taking an all-women approach for a sprawling group show. The ARKO Art Center hosted 16 women sculptors, including Venice Biennale star Kim Yun Shin, in “ZIP,” which closed on September 8, and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has 23 women artists in “Turbulent Times: Women, Life” at its main location (one of eight!) through November 17.
Another work by Park Rehyun in “Turbulent Times” at the Seoul Museum of Art, this one a venturesome abstraction titled Work (1966–67).
“Turbulent Times” was organized as part of SeMA’s centennial celebration of the birth of Chun Kyung-ja, a painter of charismatic and not-infrequently eccentric works who died in 2015 at 90. All of its participants were, to varying degrees, Chun’s contemporaries, though with quite varied artistic interests. They lived through many of the same unfathomably harrowing events—civil war, dictatorship, protests, and economic turmoil—while striving to develop careers in a deeply patriarchal society. Like the MMCA’s effort, this was a case of a show trying to cover too much ground in too little space, but it would be churlish to complain about seeing treasures from canonical figures like Lee Whaja and Park Rehyun.
Kim In Soon’s Mother Nature (1994) at the Seoul Museum of Art.
A bonus offering at SeMA right now: an exhilarating display of unflinching paintings by the feminist painter Kim In Soon, 83 this year. One choice example of her work, the earth-colored Mother Nature (1994), has a woman on her hands and knees, nursing a small child, in the soil underneath a factory. The show was assembled from a trove of work that Kim donated to the museum, and it’s up through February 23, 2025. (Those seeking more on female artists from Korea should order a copy of Korean Feminist Artists: Confront and Deconstruct, a richly illustrated tome by curator Kim Hong-hee that Phaidon is publishing next month.)
Installation view of Elmgreen and Dragset’s “Spaces” exhibition at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
Other trends? How about . . . haunted houses!
Lost in “Spaces” at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
First, the bad. At its formidable David Chipperfield–designed museum in the Yongsan district, the beauty conglomerate Amorepacific has a massive Elmgreen & Dragset exhibition up through February 23, 2025, titled “Spaces.” It is enormous, and it is vacuous. Its banalities include a 1,500-square-foot modernist home, in which a life-size sculpture of a boy gazes eerily at a window. In its bathroom, a single pipe connects the drains of two identical sinks. One gallery over, another boy stands in a huge, empty swimming pool wearing VR glasses as he stares at his hands. With big-budget theatrics and pipsqueak imagination, the artists solemnly share this revelation: contemporary life is marked by alienation and ennui.
Priscilla Jeong’s Traveling Domestic (2024) in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s superb “Dream Screen.”
Now, the great. Over at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul’s most important art venue, the indefatigable Rirkrit Tiravanija tapped 26 Asian artists for an exhibition called “Dream Screen.” Running through December 29, it’s the latest edition of Leeum’s biannual “Art Spectrum” show for emerging artists. It’s a barnburner, with a design based loosely on the maze-like Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., which has some 2,000 doors. Entering the show, you encounter a beguiling, nearly 10-foot-tall ring sculpture by New Yorker Priscilla Jeong. Open a door and you’re in a bar from the international collective Sparkling Tap Water, where a band was jamming on opening night. Each black-walled room and hallway holds another intriguing piece, and out back is a 50-foot climbing wall-as-artwork by the Seoul-based Jihyun Jung. (My climbing attempt went poorly.) Strong work in a compelling space that presents it well: yes, please.
There were also haunted (or at least semi-haunted) houses in the Gwangju and Busan biennales, but let’s save those for proper reviews.
Anicka Yi’s Vinegar Fissure (2024) in her solo outing at the Leeum Museum of Art.
In another wing of the Leeum, Anicka Yi unveiled “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” with 33 works, almost half of them made this year. Yi brought one of her early inventions, gloriously tempura-fried flowers, back into the mix, assembling them into standing abstract forms that suggest 3D sci-fi Arcimboldos: hallucinogenic contrapposto. The show is up through December 29, then heads to the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in an expanded form.
A Do Ho Suh sculpture related to his installation at the University of San Diego in California, Fallen Star (2012).
The houses that Do Ho Suh features in his art are not haunted, just deeply personal, filled with memories. At the Art Sonje Center, a proving ground for young talent that hosts the occasional star, Suh has a number of sculptures centered on the notion of an ideal home in a one-man show, “Speculations,” through November 3. A hanok (a traditional Korean house) and trees sit atop a flatbed truck in one of his miniature models. In another, a modest suburban abode has crash-landed on the green roof of an austere office building. It’s a moving exhibition, a portrait of an artist on the move, seeking firm ground, like us all, and it confirms that Suh is one of the signal talents of our times (and still underrated, despite his global renown).
A Lee Ufan at Pace. Solid, stolid, unimpeachable.
Down the street from Leeum, Pace had the most impressive show of force of the week: “Correspondence,” a pairing of two giants of abstraction: Lee Ufan of Korea and Mark Rothko of the United States (and what is now Latvia). Each man got his own floor (wise not to intermix such singular aesthetic agendas), and the lines to enter have been enormous. A special bonus: Lee, who’s 88, installed a characteristically charming sculpture in the gallery’s courtyard, an upright white stone staring down a small hill of steel.
A Sam Falls botanical painting at Eva Presenhuber’s display in P21’s former space.
Pace opened in Seoul back in 2017, the same year Lehmann Maupin entered, and a flood of galleries from Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere in Asia has followed: Gladstone, König, Tang, Ropac, Peres, White Cube, and the list goes on. It’s an open question whether the market can accommodate so many competitors, but foreigners are continuing to try out the city. Zurich’s Mai 36 Galerie has a collaborative show with the local Paik Hae Young Gallery in the Itaewon area (through October 15), not far from where fellow Swiss firm Eva Presenhuber has mounted a bite-sized Sam Falls show, in a small space that was once part of the P21 gallery. Up through October 5, it has just three works, including one of those beautiful, melancholic pieces that Falls makes by setting plants atop canvas outdoors and letting their images transfer over time.
Keem Jiyoung’s 으스러진 연둣빛 미명 (2024) at P21.
P21, a stalwart supporter of venturesome Korean artists, moved into a bigger space earlier this year, where it has a solo show (through October 11) with Keem Jiyoung called “With Night’s Nape Between Our Jaws”: big, bright, meaty multi-panel paintings of waves overlaid with snippets of poetic text, written in hangul. They are potent. “We are briefly alive,” one reads. That is why, during an action-packed art week, there is no time to rest. You just have to keep going.
A work by the one-namer COBRA at Whistle.
Whistle, one more gallery championing emerging art (there are too few in Seoul), tapped three peers from around Asia for a group show: Kiang Malingue (of Hong Kong), Misako and Rosen (Tokyo) and ROH (Jakarta). That’s a lot of cooks in one kitchen! But the eight-artist presentation, “Transposition 1: Observing the Walking Patterns” (through October 19), was pleasantly coherent. The highlight: three odd, funny birdcages by COBRA (the founder of Tokyo’s XYZ Collective gallery), each containing a captive little painting.
It is rare to see an object quite unlike any you have seen before. Behold, this Jan Tomza-Osiecki piece at WWNN.
Other highlights on the emerging end of the spectrum: the just-closed “Fairy Tales” at the newish WWNN (thank you to artists Sylbee Kim and Nico Pelzer for guiding me there!), which had some impressively surreal constructions by Jan Tomza-Osiecki and (quite an unexpected sight) enigmatic little ink-on-paper flower pieces by Luc Tuymans; young gun Sinae Yoo’s addictively alluring paintings in her solo show “Derivative Messiah” at the Doosan Art Center (through October 12); and Hwang Sueyon‘s wily paper constructions, some in a vaguely haunted shed, at G Gallery (closed September 28).
An untitled Urs Fischer sculpture from 2015 at Jason Haam.
If one was seeking international heavyweights in Seoul, they were out in force, too. Sterling Ruby has his art at the Shinsegae Gallery through November 19, beneath the luxe clothing emporium Boon the Shop, where selections from his clothing line are available. Urs Fischer has taken over dealer Jason Haam’s white cube in Seongbuk and a house next door, which he will soon tear down to make way for another. The show is titled “Feelings,” and it runs all the way to December 7. There is fruit in a standalone toilet, new “Problem Paintings,” and an old sedan parked out front painted roughly the same brown color as the road. (Seems dangerous!) Gabriel Orozco is at White Cube through December 14 with paintings and works on paper from his 2021–22 “Diario de Plantas.” They’re sliced-and-diced depictions of plants and animals he’s encountered in Acapulco, Mexico City, and Tokyo, and they’re the most eye-pleasing things he’s done in years, maybe ever. New York legend Nari Ward is at Lehmann Maupin through October 19, also with a birdcage (but bearing shoe tongues, rather than a compact painting). Joan Jonas has a display of her majestic kites hanging from the ceiling of the Gladstone Gallery through October 12. And last but not least, works from the heavyweight-filled Pinault Collection (Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Yi, and more) are on view at the Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation until November 23.
Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car at Frieze New York. It looks fast!
Big-name artists and big-league galleries are, of course, two signs that an art week has fully arrived. But it’s the big-budget brand collaborations that can really take matters to the next level. At Frieze, BMW presented a race car with a (very frenetic) paint job conceived by Julie Mehretu, while Illy hawked espresso cups bearing the trademark gradient washes of Lee Ufan.
A Brutalisten dish inspired by gomguk (beef bone soup).
Over in Seongsu, the so-called Brooklyn of Seoul, Porsche took the trophy for the most ambitious corporate venture, a multifarious project called “The Art of Dreams” that involved Capsule, the astoundingly lush design tome from the Kaleidoscope gang. There was art, by Ezra Miller, Kwangho Lee, and others; there was a series of talks; there was a Porsche parked in one gallery; and there was a lunch by Brutalisten, the Stockholm restaurant of Carsten Höller whose manifesto calls for dishes to be cooked with only a single ingredient, plus water and salt. (When foreign boîtes begin alighting for art fairs, you know things are getting real.)
Addressing the assembled diners, Brutalisten chef Stefan Eriksson praised the quality of ingredients at the local markets. “Thank you, Korea, for having this wonderful produce!” he said. His cow dish stole the show: a bowl of thin, supple slices in a somewhat-unsettling range of colors, from cream to smoldering red to mushroom gray. Never before have I tasted meat that so clearly declared, “I am the flesh of a dead animal.”
One channel of Heecheon Kim’s two-channel tour de force, Studies (2024), at the Atelier Hermès.
But let’s get back to art.
As it happens, the best thing I saw all week was actually on view thanks to a luxury brand’s largess. That was Studies (2024), a genuinely terrifying horror film by the excellent video artist Heecheon Kim, which I caught on the last day of Frieze, right before leaving town. It’s not the sort of fare one expects from a seller of $600 scarves, but there it was, screening at the Atelier Hermès, in the basement of the firm’s massive store in Dosan Park. If you are in Seoul on or before October 6 and miss it, you are committing a grave crime. The two-channel piece clocks in at about 50 minutes, and (very loosely speaking) follows a wrestling coach as he investigates the disappearance of some of his student-wrestlers.
“Horror movies these days are made in such high-resolution and high-definition,” Kim says in an interview in an accompanying publication, “that they seem to have difficulties with cinematically visualizing uncanny or odd phenomena or creatures.” Without giving too much away: He dodged that issue by incorporating relatively grainy close-up shots of wrestling. In those snippets, a glitch induces a harrowing sense of body horror that remains slippery and only half-legible, even when the coach watches in slow motion. It’s a masterful production, with a lot to say about digital life, and real life, right now, and it ought to tour the globe.
Works by Sohyun Hong and Magnus Peterson Horner on view in Shower’s party at the club Sx.
The hours were ticking down on my flight back to New York, and regret was taking hold. There were so many shows that I still had not yet seen. The pleasure of visiting a city during an art fair is that you get to taste so much—dozens of spaces, thousands of artworks, bracingly rare meat—but there is pain in that, too. You never have the full meal. You are an interloper, on the move, not a regular. As time runs short, you have to triage. What can you skip? What do you have to see?
The galleries were all closed for the night, so I made a final stop at a club called Sx on a hill across the street from Lehmann Maupin. Shower, a recent Seoul upstart, was throwing a party there and had arrayed works around its dark rooms by Mira Mann, Jonghyun Park, and others. It was midnight, the music was loud, and the dance floor was slowly filling up. Things were just getting started.
Below, more photos from Frieze Week in Seoul, with reviews of the Busan and Gwangju biennales to come.
Club Sx.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s solo Frieze Seoul booth with Galerie Quynh of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It won the fair’s annual Stand Prize.
Works by Lee Bae at Johyun Gallery’s Frieze booth.
Paintings by Suh Yongsun at One and J Gallery.
An Anne Imhof painting at Sprüth Magers’s booth at Frieze Seoul.
The London Bagel Museum, a Seoul institution, staged a pop-up at Frieze.
A glorious surprise at the MMCA: Lee Kang-So’s seminal Disappearance installation was on view in its atrium. Lee first staged it for a week at a Seoul gallery in 1973, serving makgeolli (a Korean rice wine) to visitors. The convivial gathering—relational aesthetics avant la lettre—had a definite political edge under the authoritarian regime of the time. At the MMCA, it’s being presented in collaboration with a group called OURLABOR, which has incorporated mirrors and lights (that seem totally unnecessary). Lee went on to become a remarkable abstract painter, and he just joined Thaddaeus Ropac.
Installation view of Elmgreen and Dragset’s “Spaces” exhibition at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
A tense moment in the Elmgreen & Dragset show. I moved through quickly.
A camouflaged car by Urs Fischer at the Jason Haam gallery.
Installation view of the exhibition “Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Zifzafa” at Barakat Contemporary.
Installation view of “Joan Jonas: the Wind sings” at Gladstone Gallery.
Installation view of “Hwang Sueyon: Pastel, Bullet, Beautiful Fingers” at G Gallery.
Another work by Do Ho Suh, on view at the Art Sonje Center.
Minouk Lim’s radiant, spectral solo show at BB and M, “Memento Moiré.”
Farewell.
And finally: more food photos.
Two leaves, from Brutalisten at Porsche’s luncheon.
A medley of seafood at the Brutalisten pop-up.
If you are wandering along Sejong Village Food Street in the Seochon neighborhood, stop in your tracks and go eat. Hearty and flavorful seafood awaits you.
Delicate, subtle, refreshing Pyeongyang naengmyeon at Jinmi Pyeongyang Naengmyeon in the Gangnam district, a short taxi ride or a pleasant walk from the Coex convention center.
Street toast from Namdaemun market: rich, spicy, and deeply satisfying, an instant cure for jet lag.
There are countless places to get tonkatsu in Seoul, but my favorite spot is Mesiya, across the street from Seoul Station. Go with the cheese-stuffed version, order the stewed kimchi, and pour it on top, or use it as a dipping sauce. You’ll have wait at noon, but the compact place clears out by 1 p.m. It’s the perfect venue to debrief a series of gallery visits. Afterward the meal, you will need a nap.
A bingsu to end all bingsus at Maa: chamoe melon coulis, galanga soft serve, and passion fruit pâte de fruit. Like a well-organized art week, it can change your life. More

The iconic “Rainbow Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I, painted when she was nearly 70 but where she is portrayed as youthful, has been restored and returned to Hatfield House, which sits alongside her childhood home in Hertfordshire.
“It is probably the most iconic piece in our collections and the focal point of the Marble Hall, so its loss was certainly felt during conservation—the House feels complete once again,” Vannis Jones Rahi, head of archives and collections, told the BBC.
The portrait, painted between 1600 and 1603 by an unknown artist, is believed to be one of the final depictions of Elizabeth I, created just before or shortly after the so-called “Virgin Queen” died in 1603. It has long captured the public imagination. In it, she is seen holding a thin rainbow arc in her right hand, beside which is the Latin inscription, “Non sine sole iris”, or “No rainbow without the sun,” in what is considered a reference to the queen as the sun, both a source of light and wisdom, as well as a harbinger of peace.
After traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2022 and 2023, the portrait underwent a “meticulous conservation,” by Nicole Ryder, who cleaned and corrected minor losses to the subject matter for more than a year, according to the BBC. The canvas was also X-rayed, and pigments were further analyzed.
Detail. Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1600-1603). Courtesy of Hatfield House
The restoration and conservation process also revealed several new discoveries. Most notably, “one of the key takeaways from the event was that all experts were in agreement that this likely represents a posthumous portrait of Elizabeth, rather than one commissioned and painted during her lifetime,” said Rahi in an e-mail. Ryder found underdrawings suggesting the face was created using a pre-existing pattern, so the queen need not have sat for this portrait.
Indeed, instead of depicting an aging monarch, the portraitist took artistic liberties akin to modern-day Photoshop, erasing wrinkles and portraying the queen with ageless beauty. The queen’s thick, blonde, ringlets match a lustrous, golden-tinged, orange cloak. Though she would have been in her 60’s when this was painted, it is believed the queen wanted to be perceived as a youthful, virgin beauty, a message the artist took great pains to convey, down to the smallest details. White pearls, a symbol of chastity, literally drip from her hair, neck, and dress.
The name of the painting’s creator is another great unknown, for which the recent conservation has provided a few more clues. A bill of payment in the Hatfield House Archives from the painter John de Critz for alterations to a portrait of the queen—not unlike alterations revealed during the Rainbow Portrait restoration, “could strengthen the argument for the painting’s attribution to de Critz,” Rahi added. In addition to de Critz, the portrait has been attributed to several other artists, including Federico Zuccaro, Isaac Oliver, Nicholas Hilliard, and Marcus Gheeraerts the Young.
Detail. Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1600-1603). Courtesy of Hatfield House
Other intriguing, but strange symbols by today’s standards, emerge from the artwork, such as floating eyes and ears on the cloak mentioned, believed to represent Queen Elizabeth’s all-seeing and hearing eyes and ears, as well as her wisdom. A richly embroidered serpent seen on her sleeve was also a recognizable sign of shrewd wisdom in Tudor England.
This early Surrealist cloak, if you will, was originally painted red, not orange, but it had faded, and a layer of 24-carat gold was added, according to Ryder’s study. Its inner lining was also originally purple, not gray, and made from crushed insects. Silver-leaf patterns around her cloak have also disintegrated, and the famous rainbow in the queen’s hand was not painted in shades of gray as it appears now, but full of color.
While scientists now have more clues to work from, questions remain. “This portrait of Elizabeth is enigmatic because there is so much that is still unknown surrounding the painting’s purpose and creation and so much rich symbolism that can be interpreted differently through so many different lenses,” Rahi told reporters.
The portrait’s display in Hatfield House’s Marble Hall, built in 1611, is also a return home of sorts. Elizabeth spent a happy childhood in Hatfield, according to the heritage site. She lived with her siblings in the adjoining Old Palace, a medieval brickwork home built in 1485, of which only the banquet hall remains today. But the princess was also later kept at Hatfield in what amounted to house arrest, after her half-sister, Queen Mary, assumed the throne in 1553, and rightly feared the younger Elizabeth could replace her. As historians tell it, only five years later in 1558, Elizabeth was sitting under an oak tree in Hatfield Park, when she learned she was to become queen. The park’s website points visitors in the direction of that “Elizabeth Oak,” located a good ways off the map. More

Move over, Los Angeles. Northern California is launching a new regional arts initiative: the Further Triennial, which will unite the biggest nonprofit art institutions from San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Sacramento, Marin and Sonoma counties, and everywhere in between, when it opens in spring 2027.
The Triennial was founded by art collector and philanthropist Robin Wright (no relation to the actor), who has called San Francisco home since the 1980s and is deeply embedded in the local art scene.
“It was about coming together, a vision of collaboration, and how we could raise all boats at the same time and say something to the world,” Wright told me. “There’s such potential here—such rich resources of artists and art-historical movements that we could explore in more depth.”
Wright has been toying with the idea of a large-scale regional art project for Northern California since visiting the first PST Art initiative organized by the Getty Foundation in Southern California in 2011. (The fourth edition, “Art and Science Collide,” opened earlier this month.)
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Henrik Kam, courtesy of SFMOMA.
“Many of us went down to L.A. at that time and were amazed by the richness of that event,” Wright said. “We came home and thought, well, that’s Southern California, but we have so much to offer here in Northern California that it got us thinking.”
Thinking turned into action in 2018, when the triennial first entered its initial planning stages—but progress stalled in 2020. Still, Wright believes the delay was ultimately beneficial: “The outcome will be much more resonant and meaningful.”
Helming the ambitious project is Further director Zully Adler, a former research fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who recently completed his PhD on Bay Area artist Martin Wong.
“All of that instilled in me a fiendish obsession with art from Northern California, which comes out of the spirit of the counterculture and is very radical in its thinking, irreverent in its attitude, and very joyous and exuberant,” Adler told me.
“It’s bohemian, grounded in a radical sense of independence and anti-institutionalism,” he added. “There really is no other place that has used art so meaningfully in the pursuit of equity and justice. You can think of Emory Douglas and his amazing designs for the Black
Panther Party, for example, or the student protest movements.”
Installation view of “Emory Douglas: Black Panther” at the New Museum. Photo courtesy of the New Museum, New York.
Art in Northern California is also closely tied to the outdoors and nature, the dramatic meetings of land and sea and towering forests—it’s a place where artists have access to cities with thriving downtown cultural sectors just a stone’s throw from peaceful, remote landscapes.
“There’s always been this much more dispersed creative community nestled into private corners of the redwoods and things,” Adler said, noting that this will lend a sense of discovery to Further’s geographically disparate exhibitions. “It’s gonna be right around the corner when you think you’re in the middle of nowhere.”
The hope is that Further can be a celebration of Northern California’s vibrant culture and contemporary art scene, but also an opportunity to revisit overlooked moments from art history.
“There are so many colorful and intriguing figures that really haven’t gotten their due yet. I come from this historical and curatorial urge to excavate these lost histories and movements,” Adler said.
View up the trunks of large redwood trees in a grove at Redwoods Regional Park, Oakland, California, January 17, 2022. Photo courtesy Sftm by Gado/Getty Images.
Further exhibitions will appear at museums and arts organizations including SFMOMA, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Marin MOCA, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as well as smaller, more local organizations.
“What we anticipate is each one of these places mounting exhibitions and programs, keeping with the spirit and disposition of their own organization and highlighting [the] very rich and diverse creative arts landscape we have here,” Adler said.
There will also be a central hub with exhibitions and performances, as well as guides to the broader programming throughout the region. If visitors want to focus on the environment, or on activism, or other specific topics, there will be thematic pathways to help them plan out what to see.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters’ bus, Further. Photo by Harry Herd/Redferns from Getty Images.
The initiative’s name is an homage to the Bay Area’s embrace of the counterculture, drawn from the school bus christened Further that San Francisco author Ken Kesey drove cross country in 1964 with his “Merry Band of Pranksters.” (The psychedelic drug-fueled roadtrip features in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and filmed footage from participants became the basis for a 2011 documentary, Magic Trip.)
But Further also is meant to reflect the drive for exploration that has led so many artists to California for generations.
“Northern California has for a long time been a place that welcomes those who do not really fit in elsewhere.
If your ideas are unorthodox or your sense of self is unconventional, you’re welcomed here,” Adler said. “Artists journey westward until they get here. But once they do, is that an opportunity to keep going and keep dreaming? I think this place is very much one of reverie and looking out on the horizon over the Pacific with a push towards the creation of new worlds and the manifestation of things that are still unknown.” More

Tim Burton has taken over the New York Botanical Garden. Sort of. His team has green-lit “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail,” an 8,300 square foot immersive attraction that just kicked off its two month run. For $49, experience these grounds like never before, meeting 3D-printed characters from Burton’s beloved 1993 film as its soundtrack swells, and kaleidoscope hues illuminate the trees. The Garden has 30,000 kinds of them.
“The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” is the first venture by Spanish entrepreneur Iñaki Fernandez and Broadway legend Jeffrey Seller, who’s produced award-winning shows like Rent (1996), Avenue Q (2003), and Hamilton (2015), and created Broadway’s rush ticket program.
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail.
Fernandez’s firm LETSGO has already produced the traveling Tim Burton’s Labyrinth spectacle, currently open in Berlin, but “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” marks Seller’s debut in experiences. He considers the move not a transition, but an addition, to his career.
“I found a new way to surprise people,” Seller told me at the press preview. “This is the first venture that I’m doing that takes us out of the traditional theater and puts us out of doors, in a place where you can go with your friends. You don’t have to sit down, you can talk all you want, you can sing all you want, you can take pictures all you want, and just have a rollicking good time. That’s too tempting a human activity to not get involved with.”
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail.
In his opening remarks christening the trail, Seller, who is about to turn 60, recalled spending his 29th birthday touring the San Francisco warehouse where The Nightmare Before Christmas was being filmed.
He and Fernandez met at dinner in Madrid, and bonded over their mutual love for Burton. Fernandez’s team had already worked in gardens, and Seller helped forge the connection with the facilities in the Bronx. “We knew that we had to open in New York,” he told me, “because New York sets an artistic agenda for the rest of the country.”
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Manoli Figetakis/Getty Images.
Guests enter the extravaganza through the illuminated outline of a giant orange pumpkin, followed by a tunnel of rainbow light. The film’s infamous scarecrow, surrounded by glowering orange torches in the shape of flames, welcome guests to the Nightmare proper—followed by the genuinely haunting Mayor of Halloween Town, who mutters while scrolling through faces as you pass. Corpse Kid, Dr. Finkelstein, and the lovely Sally follow in rapid succession.
Jack Skellington makes his debut halfway through the trail, amongst a graveyard of incandescent headstones. The trail’s technological centerpiece follows: a 30-foot long projection tunnel, where a four minute-long sequence of spooky visuals like spiders crawling over wood grain transports viewers to the heart of the plot—Skellington’s plan to overthrow Christmas Town. The Oogie Boogie’s installation is the real visual treat of this section, with its towering stacks of dice and projected gambling wheel, replete with the authentic sounds of Las Vegas.
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail.
Nonetheless, nature is the star of this show. Out of all the spectacles, the most mesmerizing part of the light trail is the sight of the trees’ shifting colors. Falling autumn leaves lend gusto to the smoke effects, and spiders have set up shop on the sculptures, their webs adding eerie accents. One of the most striking moments in the show arrives in its first quarter—and it’s just a stark, dead tree set alight in a natural clearing.
Whether you think the rest of the hullabaloo is worth the price depends on whether you and your loved ones love Tim Burton as much as Fernandez and Seller do.
“The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” is on view at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx, New York, through November 30. More