LOOP Mission 2026–27: Materializing Other Futures
In December 2025, Alternative Space LOOP begins a new chapter in Euljiro! Our new space is located on the 3rd floor of 172-1 Cheonggyecheon-ro, Jung-gu, Seoul, along the Cheonggyecheon Stream.
Today’s art world continues to be driven by capitalist fetishism in all its contradictions. Contemporary art is integrated in financialized systems as assets where value is measured in the logics of investment. Radicality and novelty are packaged as features of cultural commodities, and subversive art practices are regularly silenced.
Contesting such conditions, over the next two years, LOOP seeks to cultivate new practices grounded in eco-socialism and feminism. Rather than merely providing a venue for exhibitions, in 2026-27 we aim to intervene as an agent that experiments with and reconfigures synergies of institutions, markets, and the city. Our artistic practices articulate sustained solidarity and affirm the right to try and fail instead of reinforcing logics of market valorization and accelerationist competition.
LOOP’s 26–27 program is conceived for a broad community of those who wish to contend with the emergent challenges we face together in Seoul, in Korea and around the world. We know that many artists, curators, practitioners, and citizens are already reflecting on and developing viable alternatives to the present instead of resigning into defeatism. LOOP seeks to help bring concrete form to radical artistic practices that have been consistently neutralized by various washing strategies such as art-washing, pink-washing and green-washing and other constraints invoked from above patriarchal capitalism.
We will not commodify Euljiro’s manufacturing ecologies, questions of migration, labor, and housing, or the tensions and conflicts produced by redevelopment and gentrification as raw material for cultural products. Through urban-ecology and research into plant–soil–water cycles, through public workshops on social reproduction such as cooking and care, politics of fossil capital, and through Feminist Art School, we will bring artistic and curatorial practice to bear on ecological concerns.
Over the coming two years, LOOP’s 26–27 will work in solidarity with artists, curators, researchers, and practitioners situated in multiple positions—including women, queer, migrants, disabled people, and those working outside Seoul — in exchanges with institutions in Korea and abroad. Together, we will articulate institutional forms that can materialize other possible futures.
Alternative Space LOOP
LOOP opened its doors in 1999 in the Hongdae area of Seoul as Korea’s first ‘alternative space,’ with the firm belief that contemporary arts and culture have inherent, fundamental roles within an open civil society. To further solidarity, access, and sharing in art, LOOP has supported and promoted experimental artists who have built up particular aesthetics and practices that address contemporary social issues; shared current international artistic movements with the public via exchanges with artists from diverse locations; and focused on the point(s) at which the social, cultural, and artistic issues proposed by artists intersect and meet with the audience.
In 2019 Alternative Space LOOP celebrates its 20th anniversary and its new beginning as a nonprofit organization, in further commitment to its pursuit of art that is neither for private valuation nor for the elite few. The organization is made up of nine board members, all active cultural and artistic figures in Korea, and eighty general members. LOOP will henceforth function as an arts organization that is community- and public-oriented, and that engages with real social issues rather than pursue cultural authority through artistic processes and practices.
As Korea’s first-generation alternative space, LOOP remains dedicated to building alternative life philosophies and aesthetics in neoliberal times. LOOP refuses the co-opting of arts organizations by a powerful minority for political or economical purpose. LOOP will continue to create its own system of organization that protects art’s autonomy and imaginative power. LOOP’s activities are not profit-driven but community-oriented, and are therefore free and open to everyone.
Alternative Space LOOP
3rd Floor, 172-1 Cheonggyecheon-ro, Jung District, Seoul, Korea
+82-2-3141-1377
gallery.loop.seoul@gmail.com
Opening hours
Tue – Sat 10:00 am – 7:00 pm (Closed for Public Holiday)
Curatorial Team
Ji Yoon Yang, Director
Sun Mi Lee, Curator
Eunseo Kim, Assistant Curator