Featured Events in South Korea in November 2024 (July Updated)

Souimun Gate (昭義門) was once a prominent part of the Seoul City Wall during the Joseon dynasty. Situated between Sungnyemun and Donuimun Gates, it served as a key passageway to the southwest of Seoul. The area surrounding Souimun was a bustling hub of both land and water transportation, filled with people and goods during the Joseon era. Additionally, just outside Souimun was the site where individuals convicted of capital crimes, along with Catholics considered a threat to Neo-Confucian ideology, were executed. These public executions were meant to serve as a stark warning to passersby about the consequences of crime. In 1914, during the Japanese colonial period, Souimun was demolished to make way for road development, as it was seen as an impediment to modernization. This exhibition offers visitors a glimpse into Souimun's rich history, showcasing its role as both a guardian of the Seoul City Wall and a vibrant center of activity before its demolition.

More than a thousand years ago, Goryeo celadon was the product of the Goryeo people's high-level cutting-edge technology and unique aesthetics. Among them, figurative celadon with specific shapes such as animals, plants, and figures fully demonstrates the high level of craftsmanship and aesthetics of Goryeo celadon. In pictographic celadon, various shapes are expressed in a three-dimensional way. The addition of blue glaze gives people a lively feeling. Pictographic celadon, the crystallization of the best production technology and unremitting efforts, contains the world that the Goryeo people love. We reflect our world on these green containers and think about the world we want to contain. We invite you to step into the world of pictographic celadon, where there is infinite beauty and stories.

KIS HS Winter Phoenix Theatre: Elf the Musical Come join us for a ✨magical evening✨ at our in-person event featuring the heartwarming Elf the Musical! Get ready to be transported to the North Pole ❄️as our talented high school students bring this beloved holiday classic to life on stage.🎄🎁 SPEACIAL EVENT @ 5:30 : Don't forget to stop by Santa's Grotto just outside the PAC for a chance to see Santa Claus 🎅AND drink hot chocolate☕️🍫—yum!! Location: Korea International School - Pangyo Campus Don't miss out on this festive production that is sure to put you in the holiday spirit! Grab your friends and family for a night of laughter, music, and holiday cheer.🎶🎶 Information Source: KIS Elf Marketing Team | eventbrite

The Jeju Dory Festival is an independent regional festival dominated by fishermen and local residents in Jeju. It was designated as a preliminary festival designated by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2008 and 2009, and received a warm response from domestic and foreign tourists. However, it was cancelled in 2010, but it was designated as a supported festival by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries in 2018, becoming a truly representative cultural festival of Jeju's oceans, and a national festival with a huge influx of tourists and economic effects. In addition, in November, the peak season for dory, various marine cultural festivals with the theme of defense, the delicacy of Jeju's winter sea, are held to reproduce the local history and traditional culture, and to bring experience and happiness to residents, islanders and tourists who come to visit. The unique marine traditional culture and regional specialties of Jeju, the southernmost part of South Korea, are reproduced.

The Korea International Sign & Design Show (KOSIGN) is a comprehensive international trade fair for the sign and printing industry The Korea International Sign & Design Show (KOSIGN) is a comprehensive international trade fair for the sign and printing industry. This event showcases digital printing, media and ink, manufacturing, post-processing and equipment, digital display, input and design, LED, lighting, digital signage, 3d printing, and much more. Information Source: COEX KOSIGN | expotobi

NCT Dream will hold the final performance of its third world tour "THE DREAM SHOW 3: DREAM ESCAPE" at the Gocheok Dome in Seoul from the 29th of next month to December 1st. This large-scale concert will come to an end. NCT Dream has performed in 25 cities around the world, including Asia, South America, North America, and Europe, since it started in Seoul in May this year. All members will gather together, and Renjun, who has suspended activities due to health reasons, will also return to the stage, and the audience will be able to enjoy 7 Dream's unique music and performances. Tickets for this final performance will be pre-sold through Melon Ticket. Fan club pre-sales will start at 8 pm on the 15th of this month, and general pre-sales will open at 8 pm on the 17th. At the same time, NCT Dream will start the "THE DREAM SHOW 3: DREAM ESCAPE" European tour in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on the 30th of this month.

This exhibition is the only retrospective exhibition in China, bringing together the immortal masterpieces left by Van Gogh in his short ten-year career as a painter

On November 30, one of the largest music awards ceremonies in South Korea, the "Melon Music Awards 2024" (hereinafter referred to as MMA2024) will be held at the Inspire Arena was held with great fanfare. This year’s MMA2024 will be hosted again at Inspire Arena, a multi-functional indoor venue with a capacity of 15,000 spectators, is renowned for its world-class sound system and flexible stage design, creating optimal conditions for interaction between audience and artists. Before the event officially starts, Melon will also launch a series of warm-up activities for music lovers, including a review of classic stages in MMA history and giveaways for MMA2024 tickets. At the same time, voting for TOP10 and various awards will also be carried out simultaneously on the Melon platform.

'This is an equal exchange. I give you half of my life... give me half of your life! ! ' The cumulative global circulation has exceeded 80 million copies! "Fullmetal Alchemist" is the best animation in the hearts of fans. South Korea debuted in the form of an exhibition for the first time. "Fullmetal Alchemist" is a complex and attractive world view, alchemy, adventure, and philosophical thinking. It is a masterpiece that is considered to be a perfect ending of manga and animation combined together. In 2021, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the serialization of the manga, the first exhibition opened in Tokyo, Japan. Passing through Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally landing in South Korea.

Discover the cultural historical trends of the activities of the Vienna Secession artists in the late 19th century and the characteristics of Vienna that provided the backdrop for various artistic movements. Opening hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday: 10:00~18:00 Wednesday, Saturday: 10:00~21:00

The SpongeBob SquarePants exhibition is back again, upgraded, ready to start!!! You can only see it in Busan~ From humorous clips to various "exhibition-limited SpongeBob SquarePants peripherals"~ Get ready to make your heart beat wildly!!

Every night, the fairy-tale world created by the small lights brings unforgettable memories to everyone. Countless lighting works make everyone the protagonist of the light world, like stars, lighting up the beautiful night view. Vanilla Island Light Fairy Tale Festival invites everyone to come to the fairy-tale world and see the endless story of the lights that never go out!

80 Urban Reality sheds light on the urban surroundings of Korea in the 1980s through the GanaArt Collection and other artworks collected by the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). GanaArt Collection refers to a total of 200 works donated to SeMA by Gana Art Center Chairman Lee Ho-jae in 2001. The collection encompasses works of the Minjung Art movement and of realism pieces that vigorously reflect the social reality of Korea in the 1980s and 1990s.

The biggest feature of this exhibition is that it uses information from popular TV series such as "Welcome to the Kingdom", "Lawyer Woo Young-woo", and "Dark Glory". It not only provides travel information related to the main filming locations, but also combines the latest interactive technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to immerse visitors in it, as if they have become real Korean actors. With the subtitle "From Fans to Stars", "K-TV Spotlight" has planned 12 theme spaces where you can experience the daily lives of actors. From walking on the red carpet to the ending of entering the Hall of Fame, as you follow the storyline, you will find that you have "become a big star" without realizing it. The soundtracks and highlights of the TV series played everywhere in the exhibition hall deepen the fun of visiting the exhibition.

The Hoam Art Museum presents Dust, the largest survey exhibition to date of Swiss artist Nicolas Fatty's oeuvre. The exhibition presents 48 of the artist's existing paintings and sculptures, 20 new paintings, and five pastel murals created specifically for the exhibition, alongside works from the Rijksmuseum's antiquities collection. Party graffitied from an early age, studied film, graphic design, and 3D animation in college, and formed an artist collective to create exhibitions and performances that fused art, music, and performance. While his work has since centered on painting, this multidisciplinary experience informs his practice, which encompasses murals, painted sculpture, and holistic installation and exhibition curation. For Nicolas Party, art history is an invaluable treasure trove and archive for inspiration, and he freely references a wide range of artists, motifs, styles, and materials from ancient to modern and contemporary art history to create his own unique imagery. In particular, he reinterprets traditional genres of painting such as landscape, still life, and portraiture by invoking pastel painting, which has been forgotten since its popularity in Europe in the 18th century. With vivid colors, simple forms, and unfamiliar imagery, his work is at once familiar and elusive, oscillating between lightness and profundity, humor and seriousness. The exhibition's title, “Dust,” connects to Party's work, which embraces the inherent qualities of pastel as a primary mode and subject of painterly representation. Easily dispersed into the air, “like the dust on a butterfly's wing,” pastel is an extremely fragile and ephemeral material. For Party, pastel painting is a 'mask of dust', an illusion, like makeup, and the giant pastel murals he paints directly on the walls of museums are destined to exist only for the duration of the exhibition and then disappear. He extends this ontological instability of pastels to reflections on the endurance and disappearance of human and non-human species, civilization and nature.

Hoam Museum of Art presents Dust, the largest survey exhibition of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s oeuvre to date. Showcasing 48 of the artist's existing paintings and sculptures and 20 new paintings, the exhibition also includes five large scale pastel murals created especially for the occasion, alongside key works from the Leeum Museum of Art’s collection of traditional art and antiquities. Immersing himself in the world of graffiti since his childhood, and studying film, graphic design, and 3D animation in college, Party even once formed an artist collective that organized exhibitions and engagements fusing art, music and performance. Though the majority of his work has centered around painting since then, his multidisciplinary background informs his practice overall, ranging from murals, painted sculptures, total installations to exhibition curation.

SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation is delighted to present Portrait of a Collection : Selected Works from the Pinault Collection, an exhibition by the acclaimed Pinault Collection. Featuring more than 60 contemporary artworks, this groundbreaking showcase marks the first major presentation of the Pinault Collection to a Korean audience. With the artists Lucas Arruda, Miriam Cahn, Xinyi Cheng, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foertser, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Florian Krewer, Julie Mehretu, Antonio Oba, Anri Sala, Ser Serpas, Rudolf Stingel, Pol Taburet, Tatiana Trouvé, Luc Tuymans, Danh Vo, Anicka Yi, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Inspired by the inaugural exhibition Ouverture presented by Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris in 2021, Portrait of a Collection : Selected Works from the Pinault Collection encapsulates the essence of the Pinault Collection. The exhibition will span various media, including video installations, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, offering a comprehensive portrait of the collection’s diverse artistic expressions.

White Cube Seoul is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, featuring paintings and works on paper originating from his 2021–22 series titled ‘Diario de Plantas’, a collection of notebook studies chronicling his impressions of vegetation and plant life gathered in Tokyo, Acapulco and Mexico City.

Everland will open Blood City, a horror-themed area created in collaboration with global entertainment streaming service Netflix, on September 6. At Blood City in Everland, which runs for two months until November 17, you can immerse yourself in popular Netflix series such as Our School Now and Stranger Things through a variety of five-sensory experiences. Although Netflix Experience Zones have long been operated in Korea as pop-up stores featuring new works, it is the first time that a complex experience zone integrating space production, performances, events, and dining has been presented as a comprehensive experience zone integrating space production, performances, events, and dining, and that merchandise is sold in a large outdoor venue such as Everland using multiple TV series IPs. First launched in 2017, Blood City is a large outdoor theme area that represents the autumn season of Everland, and has become a mecca for horror experiences for the MZ generation by introducing new stories and unique collaborations every year. Blood City 8 is entering its eighth season this year, adding collaborations with multinational companies such as Netflix and Samsung Electronics to the horror tradition accumulated over the years to provide a more intuitive and story-based customer experience. To this end, Everland has vividly created a bloody city covering an area of ​​approximately 10,000 square meters, with a scale reminiscent of a movie set, so that customers can immerse themselves in Netflix's popular IPs such as "Jiwoohak" and "Stranger Things". In addition to the overwhelming scale of the design production that triggers a desire for sample sheets, there are also a variety of experience projects that allow customers to experience Netflix IPs as immersively as the protagonists of the drama. The special stage hosts the eponymous performance "Now Our School is LIVE" every night, recreating the Netflix original story about the students of Hyosan High School escaping the spread of the zombie virus. This is the first live performance in Korea inside Blood City. In Blood City, you can not only dress up as a zombie in the Hyosan High School uniform, but also taste the special menu at Netflix IP concept restaurants such as the Hyosan High School cafeteria (Jiwoohak) and the Scoops Ahoy ice cream truck (Stranger Things) and various collaboration goods can also be seen.

The 15th Gwangju Biennale celebrates its 30th anniversary and brings together 72 artists from 30 countries; "PANSORI: Soundscapes of the 21st Century" seeks to depict the complexity of the contemporary world. Conflicting borders, anti-immigrant walls, confinement, social distancing, quarantine policies... These seemingly different themes have one thing in common: space and its political organization. The main impact of climate change is the emergence of a new topology, a new world map in which CO2 and urban life, desertification and migration, deforestation and social struggles, the destruction of animal ecosystems and plant invasions, all become brutally interconnected. "PANSORI: Soundscapes of the 21st Century" is an operatic exhibition about the spaces we inhabit, from our homes to the human occupation of the planet. Since landscapes are also soundscapes, the exhibition is constructed as a narrative that connects musical and visual forms. Originating in the 17th century, PANSORI is a musical genre rooted in the Korean land that symbolizes the relationship between sound and space. In Korean, PANSORI literally means "noise from public places" and can also be translated as subordinate sounds. The 15th Gwangju Biennale aims to recapture the original spirit of Pansori, showcasing artists who explore contemporary space through dialogue with the biological forms that surround them. Art is also a specific place that makes us rethink the space shared between humans, machines, animals, souls and organic life - our relational space. Space is also the link that connects all liberation struggles, from feminism to decolonization or LGBT+ rights; the division of space is always geopolitical. Many artists in this exhibition address these spatial issues by representing contemporary landscapes and urban conditions filled with human presence or the impact of industrialization on natural ecosystems. Others open up space itself by dialoguing with machines, animals, bacteria and other life forms, or investigating the molecular composition of the world. Still others work on a cosmic scale, inventing a kind of contemporary shamanism. From extreme density to desert expanses, PANSORI: Soundscapes of the 21st Century is presented as an opera you can walk into.

In this exhibition, the artist continued the "Weather Series", using materials to replace the time represented by the weather, transferring the temperature and humidity of the four seasons collected during the second chapter of the residency in 2023 to the canvas and presenting it.

Artist Jung Min-ki's exhibition "People without Mass" will be held from October 11 to November 1, for about three weeks. The author compares people who have no entity or whose mass is constantly changing to "people without mass." Although we live with billions of people, the people the author depicts are people whose reality is blurred. They are "protagonists in myths," "anthropomorphic abstract concepts," "media characters" that appear and disappear quickly, and "contemporary people" that disappear slowly. Rapidly changing interpersonal relationships, information, and the disappearance of identity can also be seen as "masslessness."

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art preserves and manages more than 10,000 collections and displays works through various exhibitions. In addition, we strive not only to manage the collections but also to systematize auxiliary information related to the works. Information such as titles, specifications, and materials are located in the exhibition's proposition sheet and help to assist in understanding the works. In particular, the title is like a messenger between the artist, the work, and the audience. In fact, the name is also related to the birth of the museum. As art museums moved from private to public ownership, property rights became a necessary condition for managing and guiding works, and the technical standards and information systematization of collection works as public goods also became one of the important roles of art museums. The exhibition "The Art of Naming" aims to classify the titles in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art that visitors may find difficult, question their practicality, and clarify naming in the creative field. In works of art, titles directly affect the interpretation of the work more than other genres. In particular, the titles of modern art sometimes inspire philosophical thinking by becoming objects of suspicion rather than clearly expressing their meaning. The three types of titles for this exhibition (Untitled, Symbol, and Sentence) capture the characteristics of each era and medium, and examine the expansion of the function of titles in artistic phenomena. In addition, the participation program "Name Game" that allows visitors to change the title of the work will widely expand the experience of viewing the work. Through this exhibition, we hope to re-recognize the title of the work, which is considered to be auxiliary information of the work, and discover various relationships between the work and the title.

Public experience exhibition with Olympic sculpture as the theme

This exhibition features paintings created by Ha Jung-woo this year. Ha Jung-woo continues his work based on his interest in everyday objects and people. The characters in his works are expressed with simple lines, bright colors, and simplified shapes stand out. By emphasizing the eyes, nose, and mouth on exaggerated faces, the characters are injected with primitive vitality. In this exhibition, Ha Jung-woo shows the pure spirit and primitive power of primitive nature that he has long explored. The new works are inspired by carpet design and are composed of regular lines and geometric abstractions, emphasizing mystery and purity. By utilizing native patterns, we try to visually reveal the inner intuition of human beings. In addition, he interprets folk materials such as traditional Korean masks with modern sensibility and incorporates them into his works. Ha Jung-woo's works show people's efforts to restore the original purity of human beings and revitalize the sincerity and vitality of life in modern civilization. This exhibition traces the reinterpretation of primitive symbolic expressions, conveys resonance with the origin of human existence, and proposes new emotional discoveries.

The feeling of brushing every day is like that of a novice gardener. One day I plant cuttings, another day I sow seeds. Sometimes the plants melt if I water too much, and die if I repot too early. There are many days when we just wait for new leaves to appear, not knowing when they will grow. Then I get tired and look at other people's trees with envy. The next spring, those still fuzzy seeds finally begin to sprout in the dirt in the corner

Shangyun Gallery will host a solo exhibition titled "Beyond the Gaze of the Self" by Maiko Kobayashi (b. 1977, Japan) from October 17 to November 16. Maiko Kobayashi, who is holding her second solo exhibition with Jo Eun Gallery, uses a unique modeling language to express creatures reminiscent of animals, such as rabbits and dogs. The characters that Kobayashi repeatedly depicts are not simply borrowed from animation or manga, but are closer to natural, pure expressions of consciousness, like a child's doodles. As a person, the artist projects her own emotions into the work, extracting her inner feelings and thoughts through the movements of her hands, which become lines and colors on the canvas, presenting herself as a concrete "existence". The "existence" created by the artist gazes at the viewer or the unknown, as if they are their own living creatures. These characters go beyond simple "kawaii" (cuteness) and give people a sense of fragility or danger, similar to our human imagination, which is difficult to clearly define and cannot be simplified, such as love and sadness, fragility and strength, depression and hope. In particular, the artist, who values ​​materials, tears up traditional Japanese washi paper, rubs it, sometimes glues it together, and then sticks it on a board or canvas, adding a delicate and strong texture to the whole work. The artist believes that the fragile yet tough nature of washi paper is much like human nature. Just like the note in the corner of his studio that reads "Even when times are difficult, there are times to face real life", Kobayashi's life and art are inspired by the strong vitality of human beings to survive in chaotic times. According to this, Kudo Takeshi, director of the Tagawa City Art Museum, said that the strong and rich "layers" of lines and colors created by Kobayashi are the beauty created by the "layers" of consciousness of people living in modern society. It is said that the "existence" in the work is ultimately not the artist himself, but a portrait of a modern person, the face of all of us, beyond the self.