Korean and French Culture Are Set to Rendezvous at a New Museum in Seoul for Modern and Contemporary Art

The Centre Pompidou Hanwha, the newest member of a growing global network of art museums, will debut with an exhibition on European cubism and Korean art

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

May 31, 2026 3:01 p.m.

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On the shores of the Han River in Seoul’s bustling Yeouido financial district, a brand-new museum for modern and contemporary art is set to open its doors this week and share a slice of French cubism with the South Korean public.

The Centre Pompidou Hanwha, a 108,000-square-foot exhibition museum, spans four floors inside the skyscraping headquarters of the Hanwha Group, a Korean conglomerate whose cultural foundation is funding the new institution in partnership with Centre Pompidou, a Parisian cultural center and museum.

The French architects of the Seoul museum call it a “box of light.” They took inspiration from traditional Korean roof tiles to design the space with a curved glass facade.

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Its debut show, “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision,” which runs from the museum’s June opening through early October, features artworks on loan from the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou Paris, which in 2025 shut its doors to prepare for an extensive five-year renovation.

“What I would like to say to those familiar with the Pompidou Center in Paris is this: some may think we have closed, but we are very much alive,” Laurent Le Bon, the president of Centre Pompidou Paris, said at a press conference in Seoul, the Korea Herald’s Park Yuna reports.

Jointly designed by both French and Korean curators, “The Cubists” will tell the story of the style’s evolution in the early 20th century, with a specific focus on artists working in France between 1907 and 1927. Among the classic works on display are Pablo Picasso’s Bust of a Woman (1907); Georges Braque’s The Viaduct at L’Estaque (1908); and Robert Delaunay’s The City of Paris (1910-1912).

“By systematically dismantling volumes, the Cubists called into question the traditional laws of perspective, representing forms not as they had been seen up to that point, but as they are conceived intellectually,” Christian Briend, the show’s lead curator, tells Korea JoongAng Daily’s Lim Jeong-won. “That is the great insight of Cubism.”

A section of the exhibition, “Korea Focus: Dream Maps Towards the Modern Avant-Garde,” will explore how French Cubism inspired Korean artists from the 1920s on. The nearly two dozen artworks by 11 Korean artists on display include The Korean War (1954) by Lee Soo-auck, Self-portrait (1957) by Ha In-doo and Open Stalls (1956) by Park Re-hyun.

“Paris was a symbolic destination for Korean artists in the first half of the 20th century, a place of projection and longing,” Cho Ju-hyun, senior curator, tells the Korea Times’ Lee Hae-rin. “In ‘Korea Focus,’ we trace how the modern visual language that emerged after Cubism was reimagined through Korean realities and sensibilities.”

Future exhibitions will be presented in a similar fashion, with items from the Centre Pompidou’s collection placed in conversation with Korean artworks.

In this spirit, the museum is “not intended as a one-way introduction of Western art, but as a reciprocal exchange in which Korean and Asian art can generate new interpretations and questions within global art discourse,” a spokesperson from the Hanwha Foundation of Culture tells the Art Newspaper’s Lisa Movius and Jaeyong Park.

The Seoul museum becomes the Centre Pompidou’s newest international satellite location, joining existing or planned spaces in Belgium, Spain, Brazil and China. This “constellation” network is part of the institution’s ongoing effort to maintain its reach and share art on the global stage while its marquee home in Paris is closed.

A second South Korean “star” may soon shine. Last year, the coastal city of Busan signed a memorandum of understanding with Centre Pompidou to build a museum that would open by 2031, Art Newspaper reports, though residents have protested due to ecological concerns and criticisms of the project’s $78 million price tag.

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.