Seoul Museum of Art has closed its retrospective of the abstract painter Yoo Youngkuk having drawn 457,082 visitors, the largest audience ever recorded for a free exhibition at the museum. The show, "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me", ran from 19 May to 25 October 2026 at the museum's Seosomun branch in central Seoul, and its closing total comfortably passed the previous record of 331,126 set by "From City to Coast", the Edward Hopper exhibition shown between April and August 2023.

The exhibition marked the 110th anniversary of Yoo's birth and opened the museum's new "Korean Modern Masters" series. Around 170 works traced the artist's development from his avant-garde experiments of the 1930s, when he was working in Japan, through to the paintings he made in the final years before his death in 2002. Yoo (1916-2002) is regarded as a founding figure of Korean abstraction, and the show was the most extensive survey of his work staged by the museum.

The audience skewed young: visitors in their twenties and thirties made up 35.6 percent of the total, followed by people in their fifties at 23.9 percent and those in their forties at 20.6 percent. Visitors gave the exhibition an average satisfaction score of 95.6 out of 100, the highest recorded for any show at the museum's branches over the past three years. More than 1,000 people also took part in nine symposia and public programmes held during the run, bringing together specialists in art history, design and literature to discuss Yoo's work from different angles.

The museum's director, Choi Eun-ju, thanked the more than 450,000 people who came to see the show and said the museum would keep presenting varied, high-quality exhibitions that open up new possibilities and offer comfort in people's lives. The result gives Seoul Museum of Art a new benchmark for a free show, and suggests that a modernist master can still draw the biggest crowds in the city.