Rhee Seundja's "In the Bed of Torrent" (1961) / Courtesy of the artist
As 2026 begins, a string of international blue-chip galleries are turning their Seoul spaces over to late Korean masters.
One exhibition stages a quiet, transnational conversation between artists shaped by exile; another turns its gaze to the final decade of a painter’s life. Together, these shows linger on masters whose legacies continue to unfold well beyond their lifetimes.
Exile and cosmos: Rhee Seundja, Etel Adnan at White Cube Seoul
At White Cube Seoul, a dialogue takes shape between two late women artists — Korea's Rhee Seundja (1918-2009) and Lebanese American Etel Adnan (1925-2021). Born 5,000 miles apart, both gravitated toward Paris, where they forged their respective languages of abstraction.
Titled “To meet the sun,” the exhibition gathers their paintings and tapestries, tracing an encounter between practices shaped by displacement.
Rhee’s move to France during the upheaval of the 1950-53 Korean War marked a decisive turning point. Separated from her three young sons, she arrived in Paris confronting both personal loss and the male-dominated terrain of postwar abstraction.
Her densely worked canvases of the late 1950s register memories of her homeland and a longing for her children. The following decade saw the emergence of her “Woman and Earth” series, where geometric elements began to stand in for body and landscape, intimacy and expanse.
Installation view of the exhibition, "To meet the sun," at White Cube Seoul / Courtesy of the artists, White Cube, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025
Adnan, too, was reshaped by conflict. After the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, she eventually settled in Paris, where exile condensed into a distilled chromatic vocabulary.
Source: Korea Times News
