SEOUL
In the five-year partnership between KIAF (Sep 6–10), run by the Korean Galleries Association, and London-based, American-owned Frieze Seoul (Sep 6–9), the two fairs occupy different floors at the Coex convention center during the same week. Their dates coincide but their audiences are complementary. Frieze Seoul is an international art fair with a significant Korean focus, while KIAF is more oriented toward the domestic market and younger collectors.
With the Korean economy slowing and a dramatic downturn in the domestic art market year-on-year, galleries arriving in Seoul had modest expectations ahead of the fairs. While North American museum groups grew in number, many Chinese buyers were on their first post-pandemic trip toFor its sophomore edition, Frieze hosted more than 120 galleries of which more than 55 percent have at least one gallery space in Asia. Galleries have determined that blue-chip international art in the upper five- to six-figure range with institutional validation, plus Korean postwar and emerging artists are what primarily attracts collectors. New York’s Tina Kim Gallery, for instance, won the Stand Prize for presenting Dansaekhwa figures alongside textile paintings by the late Pacita Abad, Suki Seokyeong Kang’s floor and wall sculptures, and viscera-resembling sculptures by Mire Lee—all subjects of recent museum exhibitions in the United States or South Korea. New York gallery Lehmann Maupin, which now boasts a large gallery in Seoul, sold two Lee Bul wall works from 2019 and 2023 for USD 200,000 and 190,000, respectively. Parisian dealership Perrotin featured fluorescent Park Seo-Bo abstractions and a lifelike sculpture of a homeless person by the conceptual prankster of banana sculpture fame, Maurizio Cattelan, who recently showed at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art.
