Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
The art fair Frieze Seoul recently concluded its 2026 edition, but its influence doesn’t end there. Frieze House Seoul will bring together two exhibitions that consider humanity’s relationship with the natural world. As Frieze’s permanent exhibition space in the city, Frieze House Seoul launched in 2025 as a year-round platform for international and local galleries. Now, Paula Cooper Gallery and Yumekoubou Gallery will present shows exploring landscape, memory, material, and the invisible systems that connect us.
Paula Cooper Gallery’s exhibition is titled WOODS LANDS MEADOWS, and it brings together 14 artists spanning the American postwar avant-garde to today. The show takes its title from Carl Andre’s 1972 poem and considers how landscapes are remembered, mapped, represented, and transformed.
Works move between abstraction and figuration across painting, sculpture, photography, collage, and text. Some works focus directly on systems of mapping and orientation. Cynthia Hawkins, for instance, reimagines maps as structures of movement and perception, while Veronica Ryan draws on the island landscape of her childhood through cartographic imagery and organic forms connected to migration, loss, repair, and environmental fragility.
Elsewhere, landscape becomes a way of examining history and political forces. Hans Haacke’s Sky Line (1967) uses white balloons to visualize air and wind, while Sol LeWitt transforms an aerial photograph of Florence by removing its historic center. Cecily Brown’s Temptation of the Lapin (2023), inspired by the novel Watership Down, turns a woodland setting into an allegory of oppression, flight, and survival.
Across the gallery, Yumekoubou Gallery presents INVISIBLE FOREST, a new site-specific installation by Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. Approximately 7,000 split bamboo strips weave through the space, creating an environment of light, shadow, and movement.
The exhibition unfolds in two parts. SHIKAI (始壊) introduces sculptures made from bamboo and earth that consider creation and dissolution. White represents creation while black symbolizes dissolution, with pouring, carving, and layering recording the passage of time and the continual process of transformation.
The larger INVISIBLE FOREST installation expands these ideas into the gallery itself. The bamboo structure resembles an underground mycelial network, surrounding visitors rather than remaining an object viewed from a distance. As people move through the installation, they become part of the interconnected system it creates.
Tanabe connects these natural networks with the invisible information systems of contemporary life. Fungi, microorganisms, and plant roots exchange nutrients and information beneath forest floors, while digital networks connect people across the globe. Bamboo, earth, light, and architecture become a way to visualize these unseen relationships.
Together, the two exhibitions offer different perspectives on the same expansive subject. WOODS LANDS MEADOWS considers how landscapes are reconstructed through memory, language, history, and material, while INVISIBLE FOREST makes invisible systems physically perceptible. At Frieze House Seoul, art becomes a way to reconsider not only the environments around us but also the networks that hold them together.
Both exhibitions are on view at Frieze House Seoul through September 19, 2026.
Frieze House Seoul brings Paula Cooper Gallery and Yumekoubou Gallery into a shared space.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Paula Cooper Gallery explores how landscape is shaped by history, mapping, and material transformation.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Tanabe Chikuunsai IV fills the gallery with 7,000 bamboo strips to create an immersive Invisible Forest.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
On view through September 19, 2026, the exhibitions connect art, nature, and the unseen networks that shape our world.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
Frieze House Seoul, Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Frieze House Seoul, Yumekoubou Gallery. Photo Koh Jeong Kyun. Courtesy of Frieze and Yumekoubou Gallery, Kyoto.
