The Centre Pompidou lingers in my memory from a backpacking trip when I was twenty. The Paris museum began preparing for renovation in 2025. During this period, its collection continues to be exhibited across France and abroad through the Constellation programme. The Seoul venue is operated under a four-year partnership between the Hanwha Foundation of Culture and the Centre Pompidou.
These overseas collaborations seem to have begun well before the Paris renovation. Centre Pompidou Málaga, which opened in the Spanish city in 2015, was the first Centre Pompidou outside France. The Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project in Shanghai opened in 2019. Its scope includes loans, exhibitions developed for the local context, education and audience engagement, and presentations of local artists. In Brussels, Belgium, KANAL-Centre Pompidou began with a long-term agreement with the Kanal Foundation. The project is converting a former Citroën garage into a cultural centre, scheduled to open to the public in November 2026.
The Opening Exhibition: The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision
The museum occupies the extensively remodelled annex of the 63 Building, a landmark tower in Seoul's Yeouido district. The space previously housed an aquarium. It opened to visitors on 4 June with The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision. Running until 4 October, the exhibition follows Cubism from 1907 to 1927, with Paris at its centre. It brings together 91 works from the Pompidou collection and a KOREA FOCUS section exploring the Korean context. KOREA FOCUS, on Level 3 of Gallery 2, combines modern and contemporary Korean painting, archival media and video commissioned for the exhibition.
I stopped for a while in front of Roger de La Fresnaye's Cuirassier. I had seen it while looking through images of artworks for a project at work, so it was rather nice to meet the painting in person. Francis Picabia's Udnie was familiar, too, from the days when I trained AI models on the WikiArt dataset. There were plenty of works by more famous names, Picasso among them, but these are the two I remember.
A joint press release from the Hanwha Foundation of Culture and Centre Pompidou sets out plans for two exhibitions a year drawn from the Pompidou collection over the next four years, alongside independently curated exhibitions of Korean and international contemporary art. It also outlines future exhibitions on Chagall, Kandinsky, Matisse and Fauvism, and Brancusi.
I wondered whether, during the Paris renovation, groups of works might travel between partner museums as ready-formed exhibitions. Looking into it, I found that the official exhibition listings in June 2026 included Kandinsky at LaM near Lille, Matisse at the Grand Palais in Paris and CaixaForum Barcelona, and Brancusi at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. I could not find a concurrent Constellation exhibition devoted to Chagall. The international overview did mention loans to the Albertina's Chagall exhibition in Vienna in 2025, and further discussions afterwards. This does not establish which exhibition will come to Seoul next, but the idea that groups of works and exhibitions circulate among the Pompidou's partner venues seems to have some basis.
- Where
- Level G entrance, 63 Building annex, 50 63-ro, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul
- Exhibition
- The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision
4 June - 4 October 2026 - Hours
- Tue, Thu, Fri, Sun 10:00-18:00; Wed, Sat 10:00-21:00; closed Mondays
- Ticket
- Standard adult admission: KRW 28,000 (about US$21)
The dollar figure gives a sense of scale at the 23 October 2026 reference rate of KRW 1,325.06 per US dollar.
The Building and the Logo
According to the official architectural description, Jean-Michel Wilmotte designed Centre Pompidou Hanwha as a horizontal band of light against the vertical scale of the 63 Building. Large clear windows in parts of Levels 2 and 3 admit daylight, while backlighting makes the exterior glow at night.
The logo on a wall near the galleries also brought to mind the architectural logo of the Paris Centre Pompidou. The bars on the left seem to represent the tall 63 Building and its low annex.
There was also a banner near the entrance, bearing the name of a Palestine solidarity group and some rather forceful wording. Wondering what it was about, I looked it up. It appeared to be a protest over cooperation between Hanwha affiliates and Israeli defence companies such as Elbit, ELTA and IAI, and there seemed to have been criticism in France as well. Some of the wording felt a little strained to me, though everyone will make of it what they will. Perhaps even that banner outside the galleries is part of contemporary art.