As Seoul Art Week returns this September, the city is making a convincing case for looking beyond the fair aisles. Frieze Seoul and Kiaf remain the anchors, but some of the week’s strongest moments can be found elsewhere: inside a newly opened museum, across career-spanning surveys and in gallery exhibitions that reward a closer look. Here are seven stops worth building your Seoul itinerary around.

Frieze House Seoul, designed by Samuso Hyoja. Courtesy Frieze Seoul.

Frieze Seoul and Kiaf SEOUL at COEX
2-5 September 2026 and 2-6 September 2026 

Two fairs, one very full day. Frieze Seoul returns for its fifth edition with more than 125 galleries from 30 countries, while Kiaf SEOUL celebrates its 25th edition under the theme Coexistence. Beyond the booths, look out for Ryan Gander’s citywide hide-and-seek project, a presentation of moon jars by 15 Korean artists and Mobile Agora, a new installation by Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho. Frieze’s Neighbourhood Nights will also keep galleries open late across Euljiro, Hannam, Cheongdam and Samcheong.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s. Photo Credit: Jeon Taeg Su

Do Ho Suh at MMCA Seoul
27 August 2026 - 9 February 2027 

Do Ho Suh returns to Seoul for a major exhibition spanning his entire career. Best known for recreating homes, corridors and thresholds in translucent fabric, Suh turns architecture into something fragile, portable and deeply personal. His installations ask what it means to belong to a place, and what we carry with us when we leave it. Opening just before Art Week, this is likely to be one of the season’s defining exhibitions.

Installation view of Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul. Courtesy Leeum Museum of Art.

Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976 at Leeum Museum of Art 
Until 29 November 2026 

Leeum revisists a radical chapter of postwar art through immersive environments created by women artists between 1956 and 1976. Rather than treating sculpture as something to stand back and observe, these artists transformed entire rooms into sensorial, participatory spaces involving light, colour, sound and movement. The exhibition brings together practices that were frequently overlooked within established histories of installation art, and gives them the space they always deserved.

On your way out, take a walk through Gabriel Orozco’s newly designed garden, which unfolds around curved pathways and circular planted spaces.

Jonas Wood, BBall Studio. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery.

Jonas Wood at Amorepacific Museum of Art 
1 September 2026 - 28 February 2027 

Jonas Wood’s first institutional survey in Asia opens just in time for Seoul Art Week. Bringing together approximately 50 paintings and 30 works on paper from across two decades, the exhibition moves through the domestic interiors, plants, sports imagery and densely patterned surfaces for which the Los Angeles-based artist is known. Wood’s flattened perspectives can feel immediately familiar, but look longer and the everyday begins to tip into something more psychologically charged.

Robert Delaunay, La Ville de Paris 1910-1912. Courtesy Centre Pompidou

The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision at Centre Pompidou Hanwa 
Until 4 October 2026 

Seoul’s newest major museum opens with an ambitious exhibition on cubism, featuring approximately 90 works by more than 40 artists from the Centre Pompidou collection. Picasso, Braque, Léger and Delaunay trace the movement’s rupture with conventional ways of seeing, while a dedicated Korea Focus section explores how Cubism shaped Korean visual art, photography, literature and dance. It is a smart opening statement for the new four-storey institution, set inside a luminous Jean-Michel Wilmotte-designed space beside the landmark 63 Building.

Park Seo-Bo, Écriture (描法) No.080206, 2008. Courtesy Park Seo-Bo and Kukje Gallery

Park Seo-Bo: Changing Unchanging at Kukje Gallery
24 August - 18 October 2026 

Three years after Park Seo-Bo’s death, Kukje Gallery brings his work back to Seoul across its K1, K3 and Hanok spaces. A central figure in Dansaekhwa, Park spent decades testing what could happen when painting became an act of repetition: lines drawn, surfaces worked and gestures performed until the boundary between image and process began to disappear. The title borrows from the artist’s own paradoxical belief that both changing and refusing to change carry their own risks.

Also showing in Kukje’s K2 space is Seeun Kim’s Pictos and Pitwall, on view over the same dates.

Marina Rheingantz, Míope, 2026. Photo Credits: Eduardo Ortega

Marina Rheingantz: Míope at White Cube Seoul 
1 September - 24 October 2026 

Brazilian artist Marina Rehingantz makes her Korean solo debut with new paintings and textile works created in São Paulo. Meaning “nearsighted”, Míope shifts restlessly between aerial landscapes, microscopic details and forms that seem to dissolve as soon as the eye begins to recognise them. Memories of Brazil’s natural environment sit alongside references to frescoes, ancient artefacts and the intimate interiors of Édouard Vuillard. Visit during Cheongdam Night on 2 September, when the gallery remains open until 10pm.