In Seongbuk-dong, art week traces Seoul’s literary past through homes and hills

Seongbuk-dong in northern Seoul is one of the few neighborhoods in the city where a 20-minute walk takes you from a poet’s house to an ambassador’s gate to a hillside village of luxury mansions.

The neighborhood sits on the back slope of Mount Bugak, just outside Seoul’s old city wall. It is known today as one of Seoul's old-money enclaves, but long before the mansions and embassy residences arrived, it was a base for many of the country's writers and artists, and many of their homes, studios and galleries are still standing.

The inaugural Seongbuk Art Week, which opened Tuesday and runs through Nov. 1, uses them as its venues. There are seven special exhibitions, contemporary works installed at 11 historic sites and linked shows at 22 museums, galleries and alternative spaces across Seongbuk District. One of the sites, the Seongbuk-dong Byeolseo, a late-Joseon garden that is normally closed to the public, is open only for the festival.

Artists began settling in Seongbuk in the 1930s, as Seoul spread beyond its old walls under colonial rule. The Buddhist reformer and poet Han Yong-un, best known for his 1926 poetry collection "The Silence of Love" and as one of the 33 signatories of the 1919 March First Declaration of Independence, moved into Shimujang, a traditional Korean residence, in 1933. The house was built facing north so that Han would not have to look toward the Japanese Government-General building.

The novelist Lee Tae-jun’s house was a meeting place for the Guinhoe, the literary group known as the Circle of Nine, and is now a teahouse. The painter Kim Yong-jun lived nearby and later passed his house to Kim Whan-ki, a pioneer of Korean abstract painting, who renamed it Suhyangsanbang. The house no longer stands, and the site is now a small temple, Suwolam. In 1938, the collector Jeon Hyeong-pil, better known by his pen name Kansong, opened Bohwagak as the first privately owned art museum, now the Kansong Art Museum.

A good number of these houses still stand, along with art historian Choi Soon-woo’s traditional Korean home and sculptor Kwon Jin-kyu’s studio.

From the 1970s, the hills filled with tycoons’ mansions and embassy residences, and many artists moved out. Some of their houses were torn down. The poet Kim Kwang-seob, who lived in Seongbuk-dong in the 1960s, wrote “Seongbuk-dong Pigeons” in 1968, a poem in which the birds lose their address as new house numbers are assigned across the hills.

“Seongbuk has so many preserved spaces, and so many artists started out in those spaces, that we thought it was time to raise the question of what preserving them is worth,” said Kim Bo-ra, the director of the Seongbuk Museum of Art (SMA), introducing the program Tuesday morning at the museum’s Street Gallery, an outdoor exhibition space laid along the former course of the Seongbuk-dong stream. “That’s why we planned it around the theme of these artists’ homes. If one axis is preservation, the other is the question of how we can build an art ecosystem in this area through a project like this.”

The main exhibition of the Seongbuk Art Week, “Suh Se-ok, Do Ho Suh: Caress,” runs at the SMA through Dec. 20 and is free for admission. It is the first exhibition to feature the ink painter Suh Se-ok (1929–2020) alongside his son, the world-renowned installation artist Do Ho Suh. In the 1970s, Suh Se-ok built a traditional Korean home in Seongbuk-dong modeled on a royal house, named it Musongjae and painted his “People” series there.

His son grew up in the house and, in 1999, made a full-scale replica of it in translucent silk, “Seoul Home,” which can be folded into a suitcase. Do Ho Suh’s new works for this show are rubbings taken directly from the house: the patterned garden wall, the stone objects his father designed and the door handles.

“This is the first time I’ve paired my work with my father’s, so it feels quite new,” Do Ho Suh, whose survey at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) opened in late August, said during a press preview at the SMA on Tuesday. “Someday, when there’s a chance, I’d like to do a bigger and more serious exhibition together with the SMA, but this one was put together to mark Seongbuk Art Week. So you could think of it as a precursor — a preview of a larger exhibition still to come.”

“I couldn’t help being influenced a great deal by my father, and because the exhibition has been arranged this way, you will probably see it like that,” Suh said. “But if you look at the whole range of what I’m interested in, and at my work as a whole, my father’s interests and mine overlap in some places, but there’s also a great deal that’s very different. So I think the right thing is to look at what is the same and what is different at the same time.”

The exhibition includes a thread drawing based on Suh’s “Karma“ sculpture series. The image came before the sculpture, according to Suh.

“My process is a bit like chewing the cud, so to speak,” he said. “I keep taking out things I did before and working on them again. You may have seen a lot of sketches at the MMCA exhibition, and things like those often become works later. The image itself, as I remember it, is from the early 2000s.”

The rest of the program is spread across the neighborhood, most of it within walking distance. Below the city wall, first built in 1396, the sculptor Jung Hyun has installed seven “Standing Man” figures made from discarded railroad ties. At Shimujang, contemporary artist Lee Woo-sung has reworked the Buddhist ox-herding pictures that gave the house its name.

The Seongbuk-dong Byeolseo, a late-Joseon garden, is open to the public only during the art week, with reservations limited to 15 visitors a day. There, photographer Han Sung-pil has painted the Songseokjeong pavilion, partly destroyed in a 2025 fire, onto the screen covering its restoration.

Another series by installation artist Lee Yeon-sook involves sites where the original buildings no longer exist. She has applied hologram film to the windows of a restaurant on the site of the painter Jang Seung-eop’s house, and placed thin linear forms among the plants of a guesthouse that stands where painter Lee Quede ran the Seongbuk Painting Institute in 1946.

The former house of colonial-era artist Byun Shi-ji in Donam-dong, where the Jeju-born painter worked for 18 years, is now at risk of disappearing, SMA director Kim lamented. His centenary exhibition is being held at the Korea University Museum as part of Seongbuk Art Week.

“This area is truly where Korea’s modern artists built their nests, and in a way I think it’s quite a rare place in our country,” she said. “When you go to those spaces, you’ll be able to feel the breath of what they built there. At a time when the distance between people keeps growing, and virtual reality matters more and more, I think this is a very important project for thinking about what it means to actually experience a place and be inspired by it.”

More exhibits as part of the Seongbuk Art Week include the Choi Man-lin Museum’s “Home: Connecting Two Sculptors,” running through Nov. 28, which uses sculptures and drawings to bring back the Jeongneung house that Choi built in 1965. Contemporary artist Lee Jung-yoon’s solo show “Singing House” is also on at the Kim Chung-up Architecture Museum through Nov. 21.

At Seongbuk’s historic sites, contemporary artist Shin Ye-sun has wound silk thread between the red gates of Seonjamdan, a Confucian-style outdoor altar, and modern sculptor Choi In-su’s works fill Choi Soon-woo’s traditional Korean home nearby.

Among the partner venues of the Seongbuk Art Week, the Kansong Art Museum is showing “Sangseo: Reading the Collection” through Dec. 6.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]