As winter settles over the capital, Seoul’s museums and galleries are ending 2025 with exhibitions that stretch from quiet retrospection to high-voltage media art.

At the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (MMCA Seoul) in Jongno, a major retrospective of Kim Tschang yeul traces the late painter’s iconic “water-drop” canvases and the trauma and modernization that shaped postwar Korea.

Running through December 21, the show has become a pilgrimage site for visitors seeking a slower, more meditative encounter with Korean contemporary art.

Across the city at the Buk Seoul Museum of Art, the twin exhibitions “Unfinished Flora” by Soyo Lee and “Time Blooms” by Anna Ridler use plants, data, and time-based media to explore SeMA’s 2025 theme, “Planet,” foregrounding ecology and coexistence. Installed across darkened galleries, algorithmic projections and delicate botanical studies invite viewers to imagine how cities might look if nonhuman life were at the center of urban planning.

Commercial galleries are tapping into the city’s global momentum; Tang Contemporary Art’s group show “The Tourists,” for example, uses the figure of the traveler to question nationalism, mobility, and who gets to feel “at home” in contemporary Seoul.

The year’s art calendar will culminate in the 2025 Seoul Art Show at COEX, where emerging Korean painters share aisles with international blue-chip galleries, offering a snapshot of how local and global markets now intersect.

Held from December 24 to 28, the fair effectively turns Gangnam’s convention center into a temporary city within the city, complete with VIP lounges, live talks, and crowds of young collectors browsing after work.

Taken together, these year-end exhibitions suggest that Seoul is no longer just following global trends; it is quietly defining them, from postwar abstraction to speculative eco-futures and the everyday textures of urban life. With these exhibitions, it will be a happy end to the year, full of art.

강지호 강남포스트 학생기자  webmaster@ignnews.kr

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