Eliana Willis

In the mid-2000s, young people on both sides of the Atlantic were swept up in a subculture of melancholy. Its driving force was bands with names like Bring Me the Horizon, My Chemical Romance, and Bury Tomorrow, guitar-led groups whose open-hearted lyrics gave the movement its name: emo, short for emotional.
Fair or not, the emo scene’s reputation was of mop-haired teenagers who were greatly aggrieved with the perceived ills of suburban life. To be sure, there’s nothing revolutionary about a new generation expressing its dismay with state of the world. But, in many ways, the emo scene straddled the past and the future like none before.
A scrapbook of emo images sent in by a fan for the Barbican exhibition. Photo courtesy Andrew Buckingham.
Its sound was a watered-down rehash of 1990s grunge and hardcore, its ethos took something from the DIY spirit of punk, and elements of its fashion winked at Victorian dress. At the same time, emo emerged at the dawn of a new millennium and its tools of expression were online and digital. Fans met online as well as in the mosh pit and took music with them on MP3 players and iPods.
A display case featuring items from the era’s popular bands. Photo courtesy Andrew Buckingham
This is the subject of “I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective,” an exhibition stationed inside the Barbican Music Library and organized in collaboration with the Museum of Youth Culture. The show name is the title of an early My Chemical Romance song—here’s an angsty sample: “You wear me out / What will it take to show you / That it’s not the life it seems? / I’m not okay.”
The exhibition focuses on the years 2004 to 2009 and across a series of wall panels and glass cases, we encounter a movement that seems at once ever-present and long disappeared. The selfie is here, only shot into mirrors and oftentimes with a digital camera. The mobile phones are of the flip and slide varieties. There are obsolete CDs released by bands that remain on tour today and ticket stubs marked with names of venues that no longer exist.
Many elements of emo culture have entered the mainstream. Photo: courtesy The show’s name is taken from a 2004 My Chemical Romance song. Photo: courtesy Jamie Brett.
“Emo is often seen as a lost subculture due to its transatlantic nature and the way so many parts of its more radical styles and sounds became assimilated with pop culture,” Jamie Brett, the show’s curator said via email. “They were perhaps one of the last subcultures still linked to physical space, with one foot in real life and one foot online.”
It may only be 15 years since peak-emo, but many of the digital platforms used by fans have diminished or disappeared (the likes of Bebo, Myspace, Livejournal). Curating “I’m Not Okay” meant trying to recover a culture that had been wiped from servers, deleted from the internet, lost from abandoned phones. The Museum of Youth Culture, which is archiving and exhibiting 100 years of youth culture history from the 1920s, put out a call and had received more than 1,300 submissions within two weeks.
The Museum of Youth Culture’s open call for fan submissions. Courtesy of the Barbican.
These form the bulk of the exhibits on show at the Barbican. There are hand-made patches and t-shirts, sketchbooks with drawings shared on the early platform DeviantArt, bathroom selfies, personal diaries, magazines, and personal testimonies. Together they create a vivid tableaux of youth culture in the first decade of the 21st century, a world of heavy eyeliner, ratty converse, and studded belts.
Elements of emo have been swallowed up by mainstream culture (think Avril Lavigne, skinny jeans, choker necklaces), but the emos are still kicking. “My younger emo self circa 2007,” wrote one contributor, Rachel Morgan, under a selfie shot on a Sony Ericsson. “Now I’m an elder emo still stuck in that phase. The big eyeliner and even bigger hair have gone and I can see out of both eyes now.”
“I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective” is on view at the Barbican Music Library at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, through January 15, 2025. More

Celebrating 60 years since Giorgio Morandi’s death, the Galleria Mattia De Luca has brought to New York a stunning exhibition of 60 works by the Italian painter and printmaker. Surprisingly, Morandi has not had a major show in the city since 2008 when the Met held a retrospective of his work. More lauded in Europe than in the United States, his oeuvre is now given just the right venue, in a 19th century townhouse on East 63rd Street off Fifth Avenue.
Newly renovated by curator and dealer Mattia De Luca, the wooden floors and panels, white walls, and brick fireplaces, with large inviting windows, make for the perfect setting for Morandi’s small paintings. Here you can feel what it would be like to have a Morandi hanging on your own walls, which is where his work belongs. Unfortunately, most of Morandi’s work is in private hands or in museums, rarely coming up for auction. “Owners are attached to the work and you rarely see any Morandi for sale, only minor works,” Mattia said. This exhibit is a rare opportunity to be up close to the deep beauty.
Along with Marilena Pasquali, founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center in Bologna, they were able to procure 27 paintings. In the spring of 2022, “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended I” opened at the Galleria Mattia De Luca’s Rome headquarters. “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II,” in New York, is also curated by Mattia and Pasquali and will run through November 27, 2024. “A number of paintings have never been shown in New York,” Mattea said. “We are thrilled to be showing 48 paintings, five etchings, four watercolors, and some drawings.”
Installation view by Nicholas Knight
Love at First Sight
Speaking with Mattia on a tour through the exhibit, it is clear he is passionate about the artist and devoted to Morandi’s legacy. He pointed out nuances in the work that often go unnoticed. “Morandi’s signature on each painting is unique and specific. It is never casual, never random,” he said. “His signature is original to each work.”
In Fernado Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet from 1982, he writes: “The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.” This is an apt description of Morandi’s painting; So many times during our conversation talking about the work, Mattia said that “it’s hard to put [the work] into words.” That is one of the beauties and power of Morandi’s pictorial universe—the otherness. Certainly there is tenderness, devotion, rigor, skill. The more you stand still in front of a Morandi, the more you can sense this otherness.
Mattia saw his first Morandi when his parents took him to a museum when he was 13. “I fell in love. Ever since, I try to see every exhibition that shows his work. I collect the catalogs and read everything I can about him.” In 2020, lockdown was very strict in Italy. “For three months, we couldn’t go out. It was tough. At that time, I felt Morandi was more relevant than ever—this suspended feeling of his work. The quiet. So I came up with the idea of putting on a Morandi show and began researching where the works were.” He contacted museums and collectors and found out how difficult it was to convince them to lend the work for an exhibition.
Giorgio Morandi Natura morta (V. 907) signed: “Morandi” (lower center). Executed in 1954 (undated)
An Artist’s Artist
Whether it is one Morandi’s signature still lifes, a landscape or etching, to spend time looking at the work offers many rewards. His work compels you to stop and be still, which is one of the allures. Mattia commented that “Morandi is an artist’s artist,” and you can understand why. One wants to stare long at the visible brushstrokes in flat white and grey, the warm pastels of brick, ochre, rose, the way he animates the objects as if they each have a distinct personality, and his ability to capture the streets of Bologna where he walked every day as well as the surrounding Emilian hillside.
Philip Guston, Vija Clemins, Frank Gehry, Wayne Thiebaud, Edmund de Waal, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Fellini, Don DeLillo, all were influenced and inspired by the artist. “What makes Morandi so great is his ability to transfer emotions into objects, bringing them to life,” said Mattia. “In his early work, he was experimenting, more technical. As you move through the exhibit into his later work and toward the end of his life, you can feel his soul. In the last room, his 1960 still life with the bright white bottle in the center strongly holds the other objects. He was so grounded in his work.”
Painter Giorgio Morandi in his flat in Bologna. Photography. 1958. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Der Maler Giorgio Morandi in seiner Wohnung in Bologna. Photographie. 1958.]From Bologna to the White House
The art historian, Roberto Longhi, described him as “arguably the greatest Italian painter of the 20th century.” Obama chose two oil paintings when he was president in 2009 by Morandi, now part of the White House Collection. Umberto Eco said, “Morandi reaches the peak of his spirituality as a poet of matter.”
Born in Bologna in 1890, Morandi lived through two world wars. Early in his life he traveled in Europe to study many great paintings. His hero was Cezanne. With his family, he moved to Bologna when he was 20, where he lived for the rest of his life. At 40, he became professor of etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna where he once was a student, later still becoming chair of printmaking until 1956. When he was 67, he won the Grand Prize for painting at the São Paulo Biennale, beating out Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollock. He died in the home where he lived and worked for most of his life, just shy of his 74th birthday.
Working in a nine square-meter studio with a single bed, Morandi, standing six foot four, built a high table so he could see his objects at eye level. He often ground his pigments and stretched the canvases, and worked obsessively on his paintings. Like Giacometti, he never cleaned his studio. Over the 40 years, Morandi’s subjects accumulated layers of dust: bottles, old pitchers, a lemon squeezer, café latte bowls, tin boxes, quaint vases.
Installation view by Nicholas Knight
He was also a master printmaker. “In tones of black and grey, in his mark making, the etchings, his rigour is evident,” Mattia said. “In the watercolours you can clearly see his command of negative space. The simple outlines in the drawings are like paintings, with light coming through.”
On the wall of the winding staircase his flower paintings are on view; He often used paper roses for his subject. “Morandi was never attached to his work. He never sold any of his flower paintings. They were all gifts to friends because he felt they were too intimate.”
Giorgio Morandi Natura morta (V. 1188) signed: “Morandi” (lower left). Executed in 1960 (undated)
While the first floor of the town house is dedicated to his early works, on the second floor are paintings from the 1950s up to 1964, the year he died. “His still lifes are architectural. Geometric planes. Rectangles within rectangles within rectangles, layered. You can see his hand working. In one, the white bottle is strong and precise while the others are softly leaning into her.” In the sixth room, the last one in the exhibition, his strokes become looser, the colors more blurred, as if he is fading away.
It’s as if in the repetition of painting the ordinary, Morandi uncovered what was inside; it is that which haunts you, compelling you to return. There is always more to see if you open yourself to go beyond looking and allow the work to penetrate. That otherness that typifies his work only reveals itself through vulnerability, opening yourself up, and coming to the work without preconceptions. These works are an abstraction of reality. “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II” affords us the opportunity to intimately engage with Morandi’s gift of perception. He painted worlds.
“Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II” is on view Galerie Mattia de Luca. More

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