Home > Culture > Arts & Design

Artist Tino Sehgal brings 'transformation' to Leeum's collection

Published: 25 Feb. 2026, 18:28 Updated: 26 Feb. 2026, 17:55

LEE JIAN
[email protected]

The entrance to Tino Sehgal's solo exhibit, set to open at the Leeum Museum of Art in Yongsan District, central Seoul, on March 3 [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

An inconspicuously-dressed woman lies on her side facing the wall, slowly writhing on the floor of Leeum Museum in Yongsan District, central Seoul.

Off to the side is a piece from the museum's collection that inspired the performance: Auguste Rodin’s petite 24-by-45-centimeter (9.4-by-17.7-inch) bronze statue “Study for Ariadne” (ca. 1882), a depiction of the Greek princess at a moment of trauma — abandoned and betrayed by her lover Theseus, whom she had helped survive the Labyrinth and slay the Minotaur.

The scene is part of a work by Tino Sehgal, a Berlin-based artist best known for his radical, immaterial approach, coined “constructed situations.” He is holding his first solo exhibition in Korea at Leeum Museum of Art from March 3 to June 28, bringing together works spanning the past 25 years of his career.

“Sometimes people forget art is something that emerges between the viewer and the work. It’s not something that I decide,” Sehgal told reporters at Leeum on Wednesday. “In my mind, it is a game we are playing together, not the artist writing a text. And that is the beauty of art.”

A poster for Tino Sehgal's solo exhibit, set to open at the Leeum Museum of Art in Yongsan District, central Seoul, on March 3 [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART][LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

Tino Sehgal speaks to reporters during a press conference at the Leeum Museum of Art in Yongsan District, central Seoul, on Feb. 25. [YONHAP]

A total of eight constructed situations unfold throughout the museum. They begin at the entrance, where performers — referred to as “interpreters” — jubilantly dance while chanting the title of his 2004 work, “This Is So Contemporary.” Interpreters disguised as visitors mingle in the lobby ("Untitled," 2026); an intimate couple reenacts a sequence of kiss scenes from art history ("Kiss," 2002); and the aforementioned woman on the ground acting out Rodin’s statue, part of Sehgal’s “Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things” (2000) explore a linear progression from figuration to abstraction.

Part of Leeum’s curatorial premise is to juxtapose Sehgal’s works with the museum’s permanent collection, following the artist’s recent curatorial projects at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Luma in Arles and the De Pont Museum in Tilburg.

Opened in 2004, Leeum began with the eclectic collection of Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chul (1910–1987) and is operated by the Samsung Foundation of Culture.

“Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things,” for instance, is presented alongside some 30 sculptures from the Leeum collection, selected by Sehgal, including works by Gwon O-sang, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Antony Gormley, Suki Seokyeong Kang (1977-2025) and Sol LeWitt (1928-2007).

Photography is strictly prohibited, in keeping with the artist’s yearslong commitment to leaving his work undocumented.

With a background in political economy and dance, Sehgal’s refusal to produce objects forms part of his value system. Growing up in Düsseldorf, Germany, he has said that industrialism was “not an abstract idea, but a concrete reality.”

“It is not sustainable ecologically to take things from nature and transform them into objects,” he said.

It was this line of thinking that led Sehgal to develop his distinctive medium.

“I began to wonder what else could be done from the perspective of a value system, and in that sense, the museum became very interesting to me,” he said. “A museum is a place for long-term contemplation, but at the same time, it is also a space that contains objects. So then the question became: within that framework, what could take the place of the object?”

That question is reflected in “Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things,” conceived, he said, as “something that could stand in for the object.”

However, Sehgal emphasized, “by presenting it inside the museum, I am not suggesting that we should dismantle or deconstruct the existing objects already there.”

What Sehgal does want to show in Leeum — and throughout his oeuvre — is change in the form of slow, slight transitions instead of a dramatic rupture.

“I’ve always been interested in something William Forsythe once said: that you don’t have to be modern. To be modern, in the sense that Bruno Latour describes, means to make a rupture. But you don’t need to make a rupture, because that is also an overestimation of yourself. What you can be, at best, is a continuation," he said.

"I like to show things transforming. In this exhibition, I wanted to show how things transform. I hope that in the mezzanine, where you see my first work — with a performer lying on the floor, moving slowly — you can perceive some kind of continuation: from figuration to abstraction, from abstraction to sculptural figuration, from sculptural figuration into verticality, from verticality into the concrete, into the organic and eventually toward the outside.”

BY LEE JIAN. [[email protected]]