From Art Fairs to Biennales, Contemporary Art Is Blossoming in South Korea

Seoul’s major museums smartly scheduled their fall shows to open during the fairs, creating an art week bubbling with events. 

Standout solo offerings included: Nicolas Party’s colorful “Dust” exhibition, featuring nearly six-dozen artworks and five site-specific pastel murals at the Hoam Museum of Art; Anicka Yi’s first and most extensive museum presentation of her scientific creations in Asia at the Leeum Museum of Art; Do Ho Suh’s “Speculations” show, surveying his reflections on life, the world and his imaginings of the future; and Elmgreen & Dragset’s  “Spaces” exhibition, highlighting the duo’s spatial practice with five immersive installations.

Meanwhile, the city’s not-to-be-missed museum group shows were: “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists,” featuring 130 works in diverse media by female artists from 11 Asian countries, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; “Portrait of a Collection: Selected Works from the Pinault Collection,” including more than 60 contemporary artworks from the celebrated collection, at the SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation; and “Dream Screen,” the 2024 Art Spectrum exhibition with 26 Millennial and post-Millennial Asian artists from 11 countries exploring corporeal experiences mediated through screens.

It was the art fairs, however, that attracted curators, critics, and collectors to Seoul during the first week of September. Featuring nearly 120 influential art galleries from across Asia and beyond, the third edition of Frieze Seoul was primarily focused on contemporary art, with a Frieze Masters section dedicated to art from antiquity through to the 20th century. 

Kiaf SEOUL brought together 206 galleries from 22 countries and territories, offering a comprehensive showcase of contemporary art from local and international artists.

“This year’s Frieze Seoul has firmly established itself as a cornerstone event in the global art calendar, attracting exceptional energy and enthusiasm from both local and international visitors,” Patrick Lee, Director of Frieze Seoul, told Art & Object. “Our collaboration with Kiaf and the synergy with the Gwangju and Busan biennials have fostered a vibrant cultural dialogue. Together, these events have highlighted the depth and diversity of the Korean art scene.”

One of the best presentations at the fair, which linked the traditional Korean arts with contemporary times, was the exhibition “Suh Se Ok X LG OLED: Reimagined by Suh Do Ho, Shaped by Suh Eul Ho.” 

Displaying the distinctive abstractions by the pioneering Korean ink artist Suh Se Ok alongside the dynamic digital interpretation of them by his son, London-based artist Suh Do Ho, in a stylish space designed by his other son, Seoul-based architect Suh Eul Ho, the immersive exhibition was the perfect union of art and technology. 

Presented by LG OLED, the headline partner of Frieze Seoul, the show set the stage for the magical mix of the old and new, which makes South Korea a unique and exciting cultural destination. 

Delving deeper into Frieze, Lehmann Maupin presented a selection of eye-catching paintings and sculptures, which evoke a primordial energy, by Kim Yun Shin, a standout artist in the “Foreigners Everywhere” exhibition at the Venice Biennale. At the same time, Kukje Gallery dedicated its large Kiaf booth to the 90-year-old artist. 

A pioneering figure in Korean and Argentinian art, Kim’s sculptures use solid wood as their primary medium and are deeply rooted in traditional Korean hanok architecture, which uses a distinctive technique that joins wooden blocks without nails, while her paintings are marked by distinctive surface fragmentation, with large sections gradually dividing into smaller shapes. 

Thaddaeus Ropac’s Frieze booth highlighted a 2012 painting by American Pop artist James Rosenquist, the subject of a striking survey at the Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul. Coming directly from the artist’s estate, The Chinese Tide and DNA mixes Rosenquist’s interest in the mysteries of the universe with the equally mysterious inner workings of the human brain. 

By chance, the collage for the compelling canvas, which reimagines a Chinese box of Tide laundry detergent in a universal context, is on view in the museum show. Relatedly, Gladstone Gallery featured a fascinating 2024 painting— titled New Pastoral, Green Torso—by David Salle, a talented New York painter who counts Rosenquist amongst his many influences.

Another Pop art-inspired artist with work at the fair was Derrick Adams, whose new series of mixed-media paintings capture window displays from beauty supply stores near his Brooklyn studio and throughout the world. Adams was featured at Gagosian’s Frieze presentation and his first solo show in Korea at the gallery’s pop-up exhibition in the APMA Cabinet, a project space on the ground floor of the David Chipperfield–designed building Amorepacific Headquarters in the center of Seoul. 

In Frieze’s Focus Asia sector, the part of the fair devoted to galleries aged 12 years or younger, the Tokyo-based gallery Parcel won the 2024 Focus Asia Stand Prize for its solo presentation by Chinese artist Lu Yang. 

Yang presented DOKU-The Flow, the second chapter of their ongoing work DOKU. Named after the phrase ‘’Dokusho Dokushi’’ meaning "We are born alone, and we die alone, ‘’ the character DOKU is a digital shell, a virtual human whose digital assets the artist has been building for nearly five years, as a reincarnation of himself in a parallel universe—an extension of his soul into the digital realm. 

Equally concerned with the spiritual realm, the Los Angeles-based Swedish artist Camilla Engström had two marvelous paintings on view in Carl Kostyál’s group show presentation, “The Sorrow of Love,” in its booth at Kiaf. 

A self-taught artist, Engström’s metaphysical landscapes celebrate the healing properties of Mother Nature, with their trippy palette and voluptuous curving forms realized in a sorbet-colored palette. Her canvases channel the erotic charge of Georgia O’Keeffe, yet their spiritual energy owes much to her fellow Swede Hilma Af Klint.

Inspired by pansori, a Korean form of minimalistic, operatic music and storytelling that originally accompanied shamanistic rituals, the 15th Gwangju Biennale exhibition, “Pansori, a soundscape of the 21st century,” features 72 artists from 30 countries exploring sustainable contemporary spaces to create a stage for discourse on the future of humanity and art. 

Organized by Artistic Director Nicolas Bourriaud, a French curator who was one of the founding directors of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, the expansive exhibition shows how artists in the 21st century are re-envisioning the notion of space with sound. The sensational show, which spreads beyond the exhibition hall and into spaces and national pavilions throughout the city, is focused on three main sounds that correspond to space: feedback, polyphony, and the outdoor sound created by nature and the urban environment. 

The outdoor sound section features an immersive sound piece by Emeka Ogboh made in the streets and marketplaces of Lagos and presented in a darkened tunnel at the start of the show. The feedback sector includes Frida Orupabo’s surreal photographic collages exploring race, gender, and violence to challenge traditional narratives and stereotypes. 

Meanwhile, the polyphony segment is best represented by Harrison Pierce’s modular kinetic sculptures and sound installation, which features inflated rubber sculptures derived from a scan of the artist’s brain, with a sonic composition controlling a pneumatic system that causes the simulated bodily organs to seem astonishingly alive.