Blue-chip gallery White Cube, which currently operates branches in London, Paris, New York and Hong Kong, will open a new outpost in Seoul, becoming the latest in a flurry of Western galleries to do so. The roughly 3,000-square-foot street-facing space, in the South Korean capita’s posh Gangnam-gu district, will occupy the ground floor of the same building as Horim Art Centre, a private art museum housing a collection of Korean Modern art and antiquities.
“The Korean art scene is characterized by deep connections with both the local and the global. This is perfectly displayed in our new White Cube location,” Jini Yang, director of White Cube Seoul, told The Art Newspaper. While White Cube currently represents just one Korean artist—Park Seo Bo, a member of the Dansaekhwa movement of the 1960s renowned for his minimalist abstract paintings—the gallery has previously exhibited work by two other Korean artists, Minjung Kim and Seung-taek Lee.
Also of note, Thaddeus Ropac announced that it would open a second gallery in the city, mimicking Peres Projects, which last month unveiled plans for a second Seoul branch, and Paris–based gallery Perrotin, which trumpeted the opening of a second outpost there last July. That same month, global megagallery Pace revealed that it would expand its 8,500-square-foot Seoul gallery. The city in the past few years has become a magnet for Western galleries seeking to capitalize on the hot art market there, and for museums and fairs looking to expand their brands. Among the comparative newcomers to Seoul’s art scene are Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which in March announced it would open a satellite in Seoul, as well as the New York–based Gladstone Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, König Galerie, and Various Small Fires. Art fair operator Frieze inaugurated its first Seoul event in 2022.
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