As the new year starts, galleries in Seoul have opened doors with interesting exhibitions. At Pace Gallery and G Gallery – located in Hannam-dong and Cheongdam-dong, respectively – you can experience art created by both internationally acclaimed artists and a young Korean artist.

Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland at Pace Gallery

The gallery shows a two exhibitions of American artists Sam Gilliam and Kenneth Noland who pushed boundaries. Gilliam – recognized as one of the innovators of postwar American painting – emerged in the mid-1960s and continually reinvented his art practice.

The exhibition entitled “Sam Gilliam: The Flow of Color” features his iconic drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of abstract expressionism in entirely new ways – he transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed by suspending painted canvas from walls or ceilings.

Noland, who was a founding member of the Washington Color School along with Gilliam, was also instrumental forging the language of postwar abstraction in the US. The exhibition, “Kenneth Noland: Paintings 1966–2006,” starts in the 1970s when Noland began painting vertical stripes over horizontal bands. The latest works in the exhibition, dating to 2006, are from the artist’s “Into the Cool” series, which, in their jaunty, gestural abstractions, shows the artist’s enduring love of jazz.

Each exhibition is a two-part survey of work by the two American abstract masters that will run through March 7. The shows will then move to Tokyo.

Korean artist Song Ye-hwan at G Gallery

Song Ye-hwan is an emerging artist very much on the radar of Korea's art scene today.

Exploring the digital environment questioning the flows of algorithms that shape our lives on a daily basis, Song, 29, critiques authoritarian tendencies of digital media using digital technology and paper.

Seemingly a digital work, the installation “Whirlpool” was created with a stack of paper boards reflected with images from a beam project on the ceiling. The words that appear on the paper boards seem to sink down to the whirlpool in the center of the installation, as if to demonstrate how those words end up being ignored.

“We tend to look at the positive sides of the digital environment and think that we came to communicate better there. But the thing is, we are getting more isolated due to algorithms and communication seems to fail,” the artist says.

“Great Exhibition 2025: The Internet Barnacles” runs through Feb. 15.