Seoul! The city’s art world is thrumming right now, midway through its third Frieze Week. Everyone loves the exhibition of Asian emerging artists that Rirkrit Tiravanija curated at the Leeum. (More on that in another post.) The show of six Mark Rothko paintings and recent works by Lee Ufan at Pace is another breakout hit—radiant, sumptuous, unmissable. (More on that later, too.) Anywhere there is an art opening, the traffic is bad, but no one seems too upset. Many visitors have been here before. They know what to expect.
“This year I would say that we are really back,” said curator Valentina Buzzi, who organized Korean artist Lee Bae’s collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale. “In the first two years, people were grasping the surface, trying to understand what Korea was about, but now there is way more excitement and recognition.”
The turnout from international art types seems larger this time, and museum directors are out in force, with MoMA PS1’s Cornelia Butler, Philip Tinari of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Arts in Beijing, and LACMA’s Michael Govan all on hand.
Frieze opened Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. at the Coex convention center in the Gangnam district, and by noon its aisles were filled. This year, there are 117 exhibitors—about the same as the last go-ground—from more than 30 countries. The Big Four are here, of course, and Gagosian is especially visible, with a pop-up show of Derrick Adams paintings over at the headquarters of the art-collecting beauty conglomerate Amorepacific.
At center, a rare 1965 work by Nam June Paik, in Gagosian’s booth. Photo courtesy of Frieze Seoul.
There is a lot to like—the Frieze Masters booth of Seoul’s Hakgojae, for one, which has a Nam June Paik sculpture with TVs stacked in a circular formation. To boot, an off-white painting by Dansaekhwa living legend Chung Chang-sup is paired with a luminous white moon jar from 18th-century Korea. Hauser and Wirth has a tender portrait of a Black man by Henry Taylor that is six feet tall, subtle and strange. Out of my price range, alas, at $450,000. It sold. A smallish Avery Singer tagged at $575,000 did, too.
The biggest players, like Hauser, operate in their world, we know. How’s the market overall?
“Let’s be honest, it’s not good,” the young Seoul dealer Jason Haam said, standing in his booth, near a noir painting by the fast-rising local painter Moka Lee. “There has been declining trust in contemporary art and its market in general, which is understandable because we had such a crazy, crazy run in the past couple of years.” He had been selling, though, he said, from both his stand and his twin solo shows of Urs Fischer and Linn Meyers.
One heard that a lot: Work was moving, but not at the rate one might prefer, like it moved when interest rates were low, collectors were sitting on cash, and inflation was not yet wrecking havoc on the global economy. (Inflation just hit a 41-month low in the Republic of Korea, though, so that’s good news.)
“The market is slow, but you have to be smart,” Gallery Shilla’s Joon Yub Lee told me in his Frieze Masters booth. Smart, for Lee, meant uniting two under-sung octogenarian Korean legends: Kim Young Jin, with scrappy sculptures, and Hoon Kwak, with meaty abstractions. One Kwak sold, for ₩298 million, about $222,000.
At Hakgojae’s booth, a painting by Chung Chang-sup hangs near an 18th-century moon jar. Photo courtesy of Frieze Seoul.
Shilla was started in the southern city of Daegu in 1992, and has one space there, plus a trio of spaces in Seoul. Its Frieze booth marked a milestone.
“We applied for Frieze Seoul 2022, and we failed,” Lee said. “They didn’t accept us. So, it kind of triggered me: What the fuck? We prepared two years to participate in Frieze Seoul.” The past two years, Shilla did Kiaf, the homegrown fair running concurrently with Frieze. This year it is only doing Frieze.
If you are Stateside, you can catch Kim’s work in “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s,” an important touring exhibition now at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Lee pointed out. That is one of many institutional connections that dealers are highlighting at Frieze.
Gladstone, for instance, has a display of works by Anicka Yi, who just opened a striking show at the Leeum in Seoul that includes jellyfish-like kinetic sculptures. It sold several Yi sculptures for $200,000 a pop, plus two paintings, at $375,000 and $150,000, by Salvo, the mononymous Italian who is a key inspiration for Nicolas Party (who just opened a show at the Leeum’s sister museum, the Hoam Museum of Art, in Yongin, about an hour south of Seoul).
Works by Lee Bae at the booth of Busan’s Johyun Gallery, which just opened a space in Seoul.
Lehmann Maupin is showing Lee Bul’s enigmatic and very beautiful “Perdu” abstractions ahead of her star turn on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art next week in New York, and sent two to new homes for $210,000 and $190,000.
San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman sold splashy oil-stick-on-linen paintings by Hayal Pozanti, who’s participating in the Gwangju Biennale, about two hours by train south of Seoul. She heralded her gallery’s “return to Frieze Seoul,” in a statement, as “a triumph.”
The preview for the Gwangju Biennial begins Thursday, and many Frieze-goers have booked train tickets or cars for the journey. Meanwhile, the Busan Biennale beckons along the Korean Peninsula’s southern coast. In Kyoto, Japan, a short flight away, Elizabeth Peyton will open a show at the Ryosokuin Temple next week.
Even as the art market weathers a correction, the art just keeps on coming. On the ground, it feels like a topsy-turvy moment, precarious but also full of potential. Taste and power are in flux. That is exciting—and painful.
The downturn “affects a lot of people,” said Lucien Tso, the founder of Shanghai’s six-year-old Gallery Vacancy. His booth held just three pieces—odd, glitchy, almost-digital-looking paintings by a Lithuanian artist just starting out, Rūtė Merk.
“People are sort of observing and waiting for the right moment to get back into the market,” Tso said.
At least they are looking.