Paris’s Centre Pompidou to Welcome Seoul Outpost in June
9April 9, 2026
TheCentre Pompidou, Paris, is set to unveil a new branch in Seoul in June.Centre Pompidou Hanwhais the result of afour-year partnership agreementbetween the French contemporary art museum and the Hanwha Foundation of Culture, a nonprofit arts organization established by South Korean finance and retail conglomerate Hanwha in 2007.
The museum will be housed in a disused aquarium in Yeouido, Seoul’s main financial district. Renovated by French architectJean-Michel Wilmotte, the roughly 108,000-square-foot four-story structure sits at the bottom of Tower 63, the reflective glass skyscraper where Hanwha is headquartered. Featuring a double-glazed translucent envelope meant to recall traditional Korean roof tiles, the institution was built to let in as much natural light as possible, and to allow electric light to escape at night, illuminating the city.
Centre Pompidou Hanwha will mount two jointly curated exhibitions annually, culled from the modern and contemporary collections of the Pompidou in Paris. As well, it will present a series of exhibitions centering contemporary Korean artists alongside cultural and educational programs.
The first exhibition opens June 4 and is titled “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision.” It will show the chronological development of Cubism and will feature a section highlighting intersections between western Cubism and Korean art.
The museum is the most recent of a string of outposts inaugurated in recent years by the Pompidou, which operates branches in Metz, France, and Málaga, Spain. At the time the Hanwha deal was struck, the Korea Times reported that the company paid $21 million for the right to use the Pompidou trademark. The French museum, which closed in 2025 ahead of a five-year renovation, had earlier considered Busan and Incheon as possible satellite locations. It will launch a new site in Brussels later this year; another one is expected to open in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, in 2027.