A partnership exhibition titled "Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits" has opened at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi, featuring 29 Korean contemporary artists from the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) collection. Organized with the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF), the show includes works by Nam June Paik, Haegue Yang, Lee Bul, and others, and runs until 30 June. A reciprocal exhibition of Emirati artists, "Intense Proximities," will open at SeMA in December 2025. The curators, Maya El Khalil and Kyung-hwan Yeo, chose to present each country's art scene separately to allow full appreciation on its own terms.
This exchange matters because it deepens cultural understanding between South Korea and the UAE beyond the familiar K-pop and film industries, highlighting Korea's rich artistic history and political transformation. The exhibition also showcases a notably high proportion of women artists—around two-thirds of the participants—reflecting SeMA's collection, which is one-third women artists, far above the Korean institutional average. The collaboration signals growing cross-cultural institutional partnerships in the Gulf region and offers Emirati audiences a substantive introduction to Korean contemporary art.