Centre Pompidou Hanwha to Open Seoul Museum in June With Cubist Inaugural Show
Seoul’s museum map is about to gain a major new address. Centre Pompidou Hanwha will open this June inside the 63 Building in Yeouido, after three years of construction, bringing 10,000 square meters of exhibition space across four floors to the Korean capital’s finance and media district.
The site has been transformed from a former aquarium into what the museum describes as a “box of light.” Natural daylight will wash through the galleries during the day, while the city’s illumination becomes part of the experience at night. The museum has leased the space on a four-year renewable contract, giving the project a defined but potentially extendable horizon.
Programming will unfold in two parallel tracks. For its first four years, the museum plans two exhibitions annually drawn from Centre Pompidou’s Paris collection, alongside exhibitions devoted exclusively to contemporary Korean artists. The structure is designed to create a sustained exchange between European and Korean art worlds rather than a one-off cultural gesture.
The inaugural exhibition, “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision,” opens on June 4. Among the artists featured are Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall. Running alongside it, a “Korea Focus” section will trace connections between Western Cubism and Korean art, positioning the opening season as both historical survey and cross-cultural conversation.
The Seoul launch also arrives at a moment of broader institutional expansion for Centre Pompidou. The Paris museum is closed for renovations from 2025 to 20230, but its international network has continued to grow, with outposts in Malagá, Spain, and Shanghai. Another project, Centre Pompidou Francilien—Fabrique de l’Art, is scheduled to open in Massy in autumn as a conservation center and a model for innovative arts institutions.
As Laurent Le Bon, president of Centre Pompidou, put it in March, “A museum cannot be summed up by the building that houses it, but is embodied by a spirit, a set of values and expertise that can be shared worldwide.” In Seoul, that idea will soon be tested in a new setting, with a program built to move between Paris and Korea from the start.
