Hoam Museum's Classical Halls Get an Experimental Takeover Through December

A giant black-and-white mural now blocks the view straight through the lobby at the Hoam Museum of Art, and enormous cartoon figures climb the building's stone facade outside. The show responsible, "A Room Where Every Radio Is Tuned to Different Stations," runs through Dec. 27 at the museum in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, and it is worth building a day around if you are already tracing Samsung's cluster of art spaces between Seoul and Yongin this fall.

The exhibition is the 2026 edition of Art Spectrum, a program Leeum and Hoam have run since 2001 to showcase artists working outside the mainstream. This is the first time the series has left Leeum's Seoul galleries for Hoam, a museum built in 1982 specifically to house celadon, Joseon-era painting and the traditional Heewon garden. "We wanted to break the authority of Hoam," Kwak June-young, head of modern and contemporary art department II at Leeum and Hoam, said during a press tour on Monday, describing a deliberate push against the building's formal symmetry from the moment visitors walk in.

It is also the first Art Spectrum organized jointly with an outside institution: Paris's Palais de Tokyo, co-curated by Jun Hyun-kyung, Kwak June-young and Palais de Tokyo curator Hugo Vitrani. The result is a cross-disciplinary lineup of 23 artists and collectives from 10 countries showing 63 works, 26 of them made specifically for Hoam's rooms, courtyards and exterior walls. Graffiti, subculture T-shirts and caps, and installations by artists including Lêna Bùi, Musquiqui Chihying, SIDE CORE, Jasleen Kaur, Chulayarnnon Siriphol and Rachel Youn sit inside galleries normally reserved for antique ceramics and ink paintings.

For travelers planning a stop, Hoam Museum of Art is located at 68 Hoam-ro 436beon-gil, Pogok-eup, Cheoin-gu, Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, inside the Hoam Art Hall and Garden complex that also contains Heewon garden and Lee Byung-chull's former retreat, Seungjigwan. The museum is open Wednesday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (last admission at 5 p.m.) and closed on Tuesdays. General admission is 25,000 won for adults, with discounted rates for students and children; combined tickets covering both the garden and the Art Spectrum show are available at the museum's ticket office and through its official website, where advance online booking is recommended on weekends given the garden's seasonal popularity.

The timing situates the show inside a busier season for Samsung's two museums. Across town at Leeum in Seoul, Koo Jeong A's "OUSSSMOS," billed as her largest museum solo show to date, runs concurrently through Dec. 27 and extends into Leeum's lobby and its permanent traditional-art galleries, a pairing that lets a single weekend itinerary move between a historic building turned over to emerging international artists in Yongin and a contemporary specialist's takeover of a Seoul institution better known for its own Joseon and Buddhist art holdings.

Visitors who want to see the Hoam building at its most upended should look past the main galleries to the approach itself: the mural across the lobby's sightline and the painted figures scaling the stone facade are positioned to greet people before they reach a single artwork inside, turning the walk from the parking area to the entrance into the first gallery of the show. Details above were confirmed via the Hoam Museum of Art's official site and Art Spectrum press materials as of Oct. 5, 2026; because run dates and ticket terms for seasonal garden access can shift, checking the museum's site before a visit is worth the extra minute.