Frieze Seoul, Kiaf and a Market Moving Past FOMO into Maturity
The fifth edition of Frieze Seoul opened to VIPs on Wednesday, September 2, avoiding, for the first time, the long-criticized overlap with The Armory Show in New York (which is now part of the same portfolio). It runs, as always, alongside Kiaf at COEX, and the two fairs appear to have refined their specific profiles, both in exhibitor selection and offerings, while perfecting a partnership that involves intense collaboration. An expansive program extends through Seoul via Neighborhood Nights across the city’s gallery districts, serving as a spotlight for the city’s rich and continually expanding arts scene.
Frieze this year has a lineup of more than 130 galleries from 30 countries, with some notable departures. International dealers such as Perrotin and MASSIMODECARLO are notably absent from the 2026 edition, while still maintaining their presence in the city via outposts and pop-ups. Paula Cooper is also skipping the fair this year but opened an exhibition at Frieze House ahead of the opening with top artists from its roster, much as it would have done at the fair. But many other exhibitors have returned, anticipating a lucrative art week thanks to Seoul’s strong system of institutions and culture of corporate and private collecting.
The fair’s focus has shifted toward the Asia-Pacific region, with more than 70 percent of exhibitors hailing from the region, demonstrating both the growth and consolidation of South Korea’s market in particular, with galleries and artists rising quickly over the past five years. Flourishing demand for cultural products and experiences, particularly among younger audiences, is evident throughout the country’s galleries and museums, and Seoul’s art week has turned into a widely embraced celebration, which was not necessarily the case in the past.
Yet Frieze Seoul’s fifth edition is taking place in a very different South Korea, and in a different global art market, without the frenetic energy and packed aisles that defined the first two editions. The overall Korean market was down nearly 25 percent to 615 billion won ($433 million) in 2025 from its 2022 peak. Over the last two years, South Korea’s economic and political climate has shifted markedly, and only in recent months has the country achieved a fragile balance. Political normalization following the June 2025 presidential election, fiscal support, a recovery in domestic consumption and exceptionally strong semiconductor exports have helped stabilize the country’s export-driven economy. The OECD now forecasts 2.6 percent growth in 2026, propelled in particular by the semiconductor cycle. Still, renewed buyer confidence might take longer to be felt, particularly as speculative behavior around the A.I. boom continues to trigger sudden market crashes, as seen at the end of July, when the KOSPI plunged 10.84 percent in a single session, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix among the hardest hit.
Market-wise, things have been less dynamic, Bianca Dolfin, an art advisor and former Bonhams specialist who has lived in South Korea for several years, told Observer. “Political instability and the downfall of the Korean Won haven’t helped. This year, Frieze Seoul and Kiaf will be important barometers of the market’s current health and direction.” Still, she sees the Korean art ecosystem as very exciting: in terms of museums and gallery exhibitions, Seoul ranks second in Asia. “Let’s not forget also the two incredible biennales, Gwangju and Busan, a remarkable achievement for such a relatively small peninsula.”
“This year’s Frieze Seoul went beyond a commercial art fair—you could see it extending into and connecting with the museum exhibitions across the city,” Tae Um, a young Korean collector who recently moved back after a few years in New York, told Observer. He pointed to Yoo Young-kuk, a master of Korean modern art, at the Seoul Museum of Art, set against Damien Hirst, a giant of international contemporary art, at the MMCA. He was also encouraged by the striking number of curators and directors from international museums in attendance this year. “It gives me reason to expect Seoul will emerge more prominently as a center of art in Asia.” LACMA and the Saint Louis Art Museum organized special trips, and Frieze owner Ari Emanuel was in town. The fair confirmed that on preview day, he acquired works from both local and international dealers, including a ceramic sculpture by Park Jong-Jin from Soluna Fine Art, a painting by Chase Hall from David Kordansky and a set of 10 Keith Haring drawings from Gladstone.
Frieze’s opening ultimately showed a market that has matured and moved past its bubble, becoming more conscious and selective, more attentive to locally grown talent alongside international names and more focused on building an institutional base of broader recognition rather than chasing trends and blue-chip status. At the same time, international dealers with a longer presence in Seoul have sharpened their sense of what works with local audiences and tailored their booths accordingly.
Lehmann Maupin dedicated its entire booth to a solo presentation of Do Ho Suh, coinciding with his extensive show at MMCA, which follows the blockbuster survey at Tate last year and anticipates his next milestones at the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and M+ in Asia. The gallery sold three of his more domestic sculptural works and thread drawings on handmade cotton paper in the early hours, with others on hold and under discussion.
“We’ve seen an encouraging response at Frieze Seoul so far,” Rachel Lehmann told Observer, describing how it was particularly meaningful to present a solo booth dedicated to Do Ho Suh, whom they have represented for nearly three decades. “We placed a significant number of works on the preview day, with the majority acquired by Asian clients, reflecting the continued resilience and depth of the market in the region.”
Lehmann Maupin opened in Seoul back in 2022, as Frieze launched, appointing Emma Son as director. In just a few years, Son has built solid relationships with collectors, chaebol and institutions, while also meaningfully expanding the roster of local artists so that Koreans can better perceive the gallery as part of the ecosystem—a key point of success for any gallery operating within a system like Korea’s.
By the evening, Lehmann Maupin had also placed a number of works by other Korean artists from its program, including three works by Kim Yun Shin, each in the $30,000-80,000 range, all sold to collectors based in Seoul, with one going to a prominent museum collection in Korea following Kim’s recent solo museum exhibition at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, South Korea. Additionally, the gallery confirmed two new works by Guimi You sold to Asian collectors for a combined total of $30,000-80,000, right after her solo show in New York. From its international roster, the gallery also said it had placed a new painting by American artist Calida Rawles with a prominent Asian foundation, as it builds momentum for her Seoul solo debut in fall 2027.
A longtime presence at the fair and in the city, where it opened a permanent space in 2021, Thaddaeus Ropac was also satisfied overall with the first day, while realistically acknowledging the different conditions under which the fair is taking place, as well as the growth and maturation of the Korean ecosystem in just five years. “It’s fantastic to see how Seoul Art Week has matured across the city, with the impressive institutional developments and the caliber of museum exhibitions. An astounding offering, which is drawing a critical mass of collectors and art lovers,” Ropac commented. The Sehwa Museum of Art is currently presenting a Georg Baselitz retrospective encompassing the artist’s 60-year trajectory; Ropac has represented Baselitz for a long time and regularly shows his work at the fair. For the gallery, the start of Frieze was marked by swift sales, largely to collectors based in Korea but also spanning Asia between Malaysia, China and Hong Kong, as well as a few works going to European and American collectors.
By evening, Ropac was reporting the day’s top sale, a painting by Adrian Ghenie priced at €1.1 million. Among its early sales, the gallery had also placed three works by Heemin Chung, a young rising Korean artist Ropac began working with early on but gave time to solidly build her practice and positioning in the country before a proper solo, priced at $24,000, $33,000 and $28,000 respectively. Additional sales included a charcoal on paper by Adrian Ghenie for €110,000, an Antony Gormley sculpture for £750,000, a Martha Jungwirth oil on paper on canvas for €170,000 and a study by Alex Katz, Study for Emma (2015), for $150,000. Also placed were a David Salle print priced at $220,000 and works by Joan Snyder ($25,000) and ZADIE XA (£80,000).
With a stable presence in South Korea since 2022 and a number of established South Korean and non-Korean artists with solid collector and institutional bases in the country, Gladstone was also having a satisfying first day, placing a lamp by Anicka Yi for $125,000, as well as a lenticular print by the artist for $40,000 that dominated the booth, alongside multiple Keith Haring works on paper for $200,000-275,000 each and a group of Ugo Rondinone sculptures for $110,000 each, as well as paintings for $70,000 each. Renewed momentum is also building around Andro Wekua, whose work sold for €110,000 ($127,000), while great attention was paid to new-to-the-roster New York-based Korean artist Joeun Kim Aatchim, with multiple examples of her delicate paintings on silk selling on day one for between $13,000 and $20,000.
People lined up to take photos with the pink Turrell at Pace, which also savvily tailored its booth to local tastes, reporting multiple sales by the end of the day across its contemporary and historical program. Sold on day one was an early painting from Lee Ufan’s celebrated Winds series, With Winds (1987), alongside a digital drawing by David Hockney and a new painting by Anicka Yi, HLKR£Kþ§†MLJ, priced at $225,000. The gallery also placed works by Marina Perez Simão ($220,000), Robert Longo ($90,000), a Lauren Quin abstraction ($90,000), a large-scale painting by Kenjiro Okazaki ($85,000) and a work by Japanese artist Kohei Nawa from his PixCell series, priced at $80,000.
Linking up with Seoul’s institutional validation, Gagosian is instead staging a solo booth of works by Damien Hirst, including iconic series such as the Pill Cabinets, Spin Paintings, Spot Paintings and Treasures. “Damien has been deeply admired and collected in Korea for decades. His recent retrospective at MMCA, which attracted over 500,000 visitors, only further demonstrates that Damien’s message continues to resonate with new generations. His work is eternal,” Nick Simunovic, Gagosian senior director for Asia, told Observer. By the end of the day, most of the works in the booth had been placed with Asian collections and an important museum within Asia.
Among the big international names that confirmed their presence, White Cube was already reporting a successful first day by the early afternoon, selling mostly institutional-level works. Among them were two later Ecriture works in hanji or newspaper by the late Korean artist Park Seo Bo, sold respectively for $300,000 and £250,000, while Klára Hosnedlová’s The Observer, in cotton thread and silicone resin, was placed for €175,000. Other works sold included pieces by Alia Ahmad ($120,000) and Tesfaye Urgessa (£120,000), and a more challenging Ibrahim Mahama installation priced at €85,000. The gallery also placed Yoko Matsumoto’s watercolor for $5,500, while two works by Salvatore Emblema, both Untitled (1978), in raw pigments on overlaid jute canvases, sold for €40,000 and €26,000 respectively. Gerhard Richter’s Fuji (1996) was also reported among the sales, but the price was not disclosed.
Also returning was David Zwirner, with a booth dominated by a giant Yayoi Kusama sculpture and a large white Infinity Net, in homage to the Japanese artist who passed away just a week before the fair. By the evening, Zwirner was reporting the sale of a 1976 wall-mounted bronze wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa, as well as the series of new paintings by Lucas Arruda hanging at the front, which were acquired by a museum in Asia. The gallery also sold paintings by Luc Tuymans, Michaël Borremans, Alice Neel and Dana Schutz, alongside a 1942 canvas by Giorgio Morandi, who remains a favorite in Asia, and a new work by Walter Price. The gallery’s associate partner James Green was confident that more sales would come as the week progressed.
Playing the long game is key to the way they’ve approached this market, Marc Payot, Hauser & Wirth president, emphasized. On day one, the gallery placed some of the top works by Louise Bourgeois, Lorna Simpson, Jenny Holzer, Jeffrey Gibson and Angel Otero in the booth, mostly with collections in Asia, with prices ranging from $185,000 to $600,000.
Sprüth Magers had a strong showing as well, selling a John Baldessari collage for $75,000, a Rosemarie Trockel for €270,000 and an Oliver Bak painting for €30,000, all to private collectors in Europe. A work by Cyprien Gaillard went instead to an institutional collection in Asia for €200,000; a Gala Porras-Kim to a private collection in North America; and an Arthur Jafa silkscreen on an aluminum panel to a private collection in Asia for $85,000. Salvo’s later, more colorful landscapes also continue to sell well in Korea, with one sold for $215,000 to a private collection.
The appeal of Salvo, as well as the growing appreciation for Italian postwar art that the gallery has been cultivating through its annual exhibition with the embassy, is one reason Mazzoleni keeps returning to the fair, even as other Italian peers have left. The gallery confirmed early interest and ongoing negotiations around several of the historical works on view, particularly by De Chirico and Salvo, while on the contemporary side attention focused on new embroideries by Marinella Senatore, produced with a female textile school in Bombay; works by Rebecca Moccia, who represented the country at the last Gwangju Biennale; and Andrea Francolino, who has works in the annual “Italy at Frieze: The Golden Trace” show at the embassy, in dialogue with Korean artist Yeesookyung.
Leading the show were the local giants, which typically double up, bringing works to both Frieze and Kiaf. On VIP day, Gallery Hyundai sold multiple works from its dual presentation by Seung-taek Lee (priced between $170,000 and $700,000) and signature drip paintings by Kim Tschang-yeul, all priced between $180,000 and $1.1 million following the extensive survey at MMCA last year.
Meanwhile, Korean powerhouse Kukje Gallery sold Ha Chong-Hyun’s mixed-media work ($253,000-303,600) and Park Seo-Bo’s 2022 Ecriture No. 220611 ($250,000-300,000), alongside works by more contemporary artists such as Kibong Rhee ($120,000-144,000), the always in-demand Suki Seokyeong Kang ($100,000-120,000), Julian Opie’s Dance 2 figure 2 step 2 (2022) for £45,000-54,000 ($61,000-73,000) and Gala Porras-Kim’s monumental graphite-on-paper work ($65,000-78,000). By the next day, the gallery also confirmed a $1.6 million sale of a canvas by Yoo Youngkuk, which became the most expensive work sold so far at the fair.
Leeahn Gallery also placed a vibrant canvas by Tomokazu Matsuyama in the early hours for $290,000. (The Japanese artist opened a show at the gallery in Daegu last week.) Also sold were a painting by Lee Kang-So for ₩320,000,000 ($235,000), two works by Lee Jin-Woo in mixed media with hanji on linen for €68,000 and €43,000 respectively and a mixed-media work on canvas by Kim Keun-Tai for $59,000.
Meanwhile, BB&M found buyers for all three works by Lee Bul presented at its booth (priced at $290,000, $275,000 and $195,000) just as the artist prepares to open her debut solo at Hauser & Wirth New York following several years of remarkable institutional achievements.
Given the continuous demand for Lee Bae’s work, Johyun Gallery’s zen-garden-like solo booth also brought several sales: six bronze sculptures sold for between $40,000 and $140,000, alongside two charcoal-on-canvas works for £125,000 and £75,000, plus an acrylic on canvas by Kim Hong Joo for $77,000.
Promoted to the main section, just next to Zwirner and in front of David Kordansky (with a solo by Chase Hall), CYLINDER’s booth unfolds as a multiplication of distinct, contained solo presentations, offering a clear overview of the role the fast-rising gallery has played in just five years since its founding in shaping an entire generation of up-and-coming artists who are now establishing themselves in and outside the country, many of whom were given their first post-graduate show at the gallery. The gallery placed several works by Rim Park, Sunwon Chang, Minseo Kang and Seo Hyun Kim on day one, all priced between $1,000 and $10,000, with other conversations awaiting confirmation.
More Japanese galleries are participating this year as the two countries have begun collaborating more closely despite their troubled history, and as the Japanese government has finally started supporting the art business by funding participation in international fairs, in an effort to catch up with South Korea.
Strong and international was the booth of Kotaro Nukaga, with works ranging from José Parlá abstractions to the Indigenous mythmaking of Rember Yahuarcani, sold in the $50,000-80,000 range; Tomokazu Matsuyama’s vibrant, pop-eclectic shaped canvases, which sold rapidly in the $250,000-300,000 range; and floating paper fish by Japanese-Canadian artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, who is currently presenting at the Venice Biennale and will soon unveil an installation at the inaugural Maebashi Biennale. The Matsuyama and Yahuarcani works sold in the pre-preview, but the gallery also received strong interest and reserves for Stefan Brüggemann, Keita Morimoto, Tomona Matsukawa and Kazuhito Kawai. “The buyers have come from across the region, including Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and we have also received a number of encouraging inquiries from collectors based outside these countries,” Nukaga told Observer. “Last year, works from our booth were acquired primarily by collectors from Europe and Southeast Asia, whereas this year we have seen particularly strong purchasing activity from East Asian collectors.”
Meanwhile, right at the entrance, Taro Nasu is presenting, as he did in Hong Kong, a dialogue between the sarcastic hyperrealism of Ryan Gander and Marcel Broodthaers, with a booth featuring a gigantic black ball, while Taka Ishii staged a compelling dialogue between the gestural abstraction of Jadé Fadojutimi and the more muted yet psychologically expansive paintings of young Kyoto-based artist Fu Nagasawa, who will have a solo show with Vacancy in Shanghai next year. Similarly psychologically charged, but also suspended in an eerie, unsettling and inexpressive atmosphere, are the characters of Japanese Berlin-based artist Tenki Hiramatsu, presented by Tokyo-based gallery Kosaku Kanechika, all priced between $4,000 and $20,000, just as attention grows around the artist both internationally and in his home country.
At SCAI The Bathhouse, Kohei Nawa’s smaller works were priced at around $100,000, while the presentation also included Tatsuo Miyajima and aluminum sculptures by younger artists Moon Kyungeon and Jeon John. Next door, Anomaly presented Toshiyuki Konishi’s haunting paintings exploring human relationships, alongside a selection of works by Taeko Tatsuno, one of the most influential figures in Japanese abstraction, spanning different moments in her career, and younger contemporary artist Takuro Tamayama. The audience was larger than expected, Yuka Watanabe told Observer, and they received many inquiries, especially about Toshiyuki Konishi’s piece.
At Kaikai Kiki, the gallery’s familiar manga-inflected visual language surfaced in a more enigmatic register through Zangano’s intriguing faceless avatars, figures that retain the polished immediacy of Japanese pop imagery while replacing expressive features with an unsettling anonymity.
The fair also provided a platform for many galleries from the broader APAC region to build a stronger following in the country. Participating since the first edition, Shanghai-based Vacancy proved well aware that things were not as they had been before, but the gallery remained positive that many conversations would close in the following days. When we spoke in the evening, Lucien Y. Tso, the founder, was pleased to have already placed the largest and most expensive work in the booth, a major piece by Michael Ho priced at $50,000, with a foundation in Singapore.
Meanwhile, the Filipino gallery The Drawing Room, debuted at the fair with a solo booth by young and promising artist Chelsea Theodossis, whose large-scale hyperrealistic paintings depict clay sculptures molded by the artist to embody psychological states and serve as poetic metaphors for the contemporary human condition, with prices between $11,000 and $30,000.
Also returning this year was L.A.-based Make Room, which has strong representation in Asia, with a solid booth dominated by a large new painting by rising Korean artist Sun Woo, accompanied by an entire garden of new bronze sculptures that expanded her dystopian landscape into the space. The booth featured works by names from its roster with which Koreans had likely already become familiar in past editions, except for a work by Xingzi Gu, who, after working with CLEARING and LUBOV, is now preparing a show with Make Room in L.A.
Frieze Seoul gets experimental
But it was the fair’s curated sections that were most rewarding for discovery. Focus, advised this year by Seolhui Lee, remains one of Frieze Seoul’s strongest platforms for emerging talent, bringing together 16 galleries founded in or after 2014, nine of them based in Asia, as the section expanded beyond its former regional focus for the first time.
New York- and Cologne-based Gaa, for instance, made its Seoul debut with a solo presentation of Johanna Seidel, whose psychological figures appear to confront life’s dilemmas while suspended between domestic interiors and unruly landscapes, light and darkness that seem to mirror states of mind more than physical conditions.
Perhaps no medium felt better suited to this younger section in Seoul than a video game. São Paulo gallery Yehudi Hollander-Pappi presented Brazilian artist Gabriel Massan with an immersive installation centered on interactive gameplay projected across a curved 4K screen, accompanied by two bronze sculptures derived from the artist’s digital universe. Drawing from Carl Jung’s writing on dreams, images and the unconscious, the game approaches movement as a process of becoming, shaped by adaptation and shifting relations between selves, systems and territories. Developed in Unreal Engine and operated via a custom-built joystick, it unfolds into a continuous, playable world that visitors can enter and leave at any time. Massan’s virtual ecosystems treat bodies and identities as unstable, mutable forms shaped by technology, history, conflict and systems of control, generating scenarios that include primate-like figures in a speculative world attempting to imagine existential structures without domination. The bronzes, physical descendants of Massan’s digital characters, were offered at $22,000 in editions of three.
Presented by Budapest’s Longtermhandstand, Romanian-born Hungarian artist Botond Keresztesi offered another collision of the digital, mystical and art historical. Seven new paintings revolve around the recurring image of the hourglass, each tied to one of the seven chakras and a corresponding mineral or energetic state. The paintings are presented in custom sculptural frames inspired by the Tank Louis Cartier watch, extending this imagery and meditation on time across dimensions. Last year, X Museum in Beijing staged the largest survey of his work to date, and the artist was recently included in Phaidon’s Vitamin P4: New Perspectives in Painting, a global survey of a new generation of artists experimenting with and expanding the possibilities of painting. The smaller paintings here were priced around $4,600.
At FOUNDRY SEOUL, one of the most promising Korean artists, Omyo Cho, transformed the sand-toned booth into a speculative ecosystem populated by biomorphic forms in glass and metal—fantastical hybrid organisms that seemed at once prehistoric and futuristic. Cho often begins her worldbuilding with writing, constructing science-fiction narratives before materializing the imagined lifeforms as sculptures. The result is a speculative scenario that attempts to visualize alternative possibilities for interspecies existence, as plants and non-human entities adapt to climate catastrophe and radically altered environmental conditions. With works priced between approximately $8,000 and $40,000, the gallery was satisfied with the early response.
Debuting in Seoul from Stockholm, Coulisse brought Korean artist Reeha Lim, whose delicate paintings on translucent silk are deeply informed by movement and displacement. Raised Korean in China before returning to Korea and later studying in the United States, Lim uses double-sided surfaces, ghostlike bodies and fragmented spatial perspectives to evoke the instability of relocation and the strange psychic dismemberment that can accompany it. A three-panel folding screen painted on both sides of translucent silk was particularly effective, refusing the possibility of any single, stable viewpoint. Works were priced between roughly $3,500 and $10,000.
More spiritual and archetypal was Lilyjon’s presentation with Shanghai’s Cub_ism_ Artspace. If the artist stood out two years ago in Miami with his symbolically dense paintings, here the poetic mythopoesis extended across media with his Box of Fallacy sculptures arranged on shelves conceived as “everyday altars,” mixing ordinary objects and bodily imagery to collapse distinctions between religion, magic and daily routine. Across the booth, Lilyjon tries to restore this lost sense of ritual while playfully staging and accepting the absurdity of our terrestrial and mundane lives. Between sacred and eerie, reality and illusion, he envisions a universal form of spirituality rooted less in organized belief than in ritual, human connection and an imagined relationship with the cosmos. Prices ranged from around $1,600 to $8,000.
Another materially compelling presentation in the section was that of Mongolian-born Bekhbaatar Enkhtur at Rome’s Matèria. Enkhtur works with deliberately mutable materials, including beeswax and pewter, drawing on traditions in which matter is never entirely fixed but continually transformed. His wall-mounted pewter reliefs reference a Mongolian ritual in which molten metal is poured into
Meanwhile, Tokyo’s CON_ is presenting Korean artist Minhee Kim, following the sold-out presentation at Tokyo Gendai last year, with paintings in which feminized bodies become glitching cyborg surfaces fractured by digital noise, which the artist renders through the physical, agitated drawing gesture that reconnects hand and mind, here expanding beyond the canvas onto the booth walls. “The response to Minhee’s first solo presentation with us at Frieze has been immediate. Collectors are drawn to the physicality of her surfaces, and the wall drawing she is creating on site lets people witness that energy directly,” Kato Hisatomo, the gallery’s owner, told Observer, noting that for a young Korean painter showing with a Tokyo gallery, Seoul feels like exactly the right place for this conversation to start. The gallery sold several works on day one, all priced under $20,000, to private collections.
Finally, Shanghai gallery Linseed presented South Korean artist Shumu, who trained in woodcut and copperplate printmaking at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her extraordinarily delicate woodcuts turn animals into almost spectral presences, using the grain of the wood and dense accumulations of fine incisions to meditate on life, death and regeneration. Images of crows feeding on carcasses give way to butterflies and other signs of renewed life, locating humanity inside rather than above the cycles of the natural world. Ranging in size, the works were priced from $3,500 to $20,000.
Kiaf comes into its own
If Frieze Seoul has become decidedly more regional, Kiaf, the historic fair organized by the Korean Galleries Association, is becoming increasingly local, functioning as a platform for Korea’s expansive gallery scene. Of this year’s 175 galleries, only 48 were from abroad.
Busan- and New York-based LEE & BAE presented Bongsang Yoo’s dreamlike landscapes: looking like hyperreal photographs or digitally generated images, their surfaces are actually constructed from thousands of tiny headless pins, inserted only halfway and left exposed so that their shadows effectively draw the landscape. Nearby, Minjeong Guem pushed that tension between nature and simulation further with her “video sculptures,” embedding moving images of
Among the international galleries at Kiaf, Paris-based Galerie Marguo created a dialogue between two different painting series that emerged from the observation of nature, by artists who both recently had shows at Château La Coste in the South of France. On one side of the booth hung a line of small paintings by Claudia Keep from her recent show there, each depicting in hyper-detailed close-up the relationship between flowers and insects—poetic yet uncanny records of everyday beauty and reminders of ecological fragility. Priced at $7,500 each, several had already sold by the afternoon. Alongside them, the gallery was showing molecular-like watercolors by Chinese artist Ziping Wang, inspired by her time in Menorca, where the gallery has a residency. Floating organic fragments appear encapsulated in transparent containers, allowing pigment,
As it has become increasingly rare to see Russian galleries at international fairs, an interesting presence this year is St. Petersburg’s Anna Nova Gallery, which brings a solo presentation by Russian-born, New York-based Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov. Staging a dialogue between a body of works that moves fluidly between sculpture and painting within this soft, textile-covered booth, the artist addresses the performance and instability of the self. Faces disappear beneath fabric, bodies become masked or mutated, and fleece, wax and leather operate as surrogate skins. The softness of the booth environment where this narrative takes place is deliberately ambiguous, offering insulation and protection while simultaneously suggesting withdrawal, dissociation and the pressure to adopt an acceptable social identity. Prices ranged from roughly $3,000 to $16,000.
Nearby, first-time exhibitor Jacob Arthur Gallery continued its successful formula with a selection of Dan Life’s shimmering sequin compositions, appropriating and remixing already familiar images from art history and contemporary culture, here cannily localized, with works riffing on Hokusai and Yoshitomo Nara. Judging by the proliferation of red dots by mid-afternoon, the strategy was successful: the gallery sold 11 works by the evening, with two acquired by the Koo House Museum in Seoul.
Making its Kiaf debut, Nino Mier Gallery seemed particularly well calibrated to Korean tastes, balancing the uncanny hyperrealism of Tony Matelli’s meticulously fabricated Weed sculptures with Andrew Dadson’s colorful, heavily worked abstractions, in which layers of paint turn the supposedly flat surface into something almost geological. The gallery also reported particularly strong attention around André Butzer, whose deliberately awkward figures and collisions of German Expressionism and American popular culture have long occupied the unstable border between abstraction and figuration.
There were also some more established names and several expensive gems. Johyun Gallery, meanwhile, effectively maintained a dual presence across the two fairs: a solo presentation of Lee Bae at Frieze and a broader Kiaf booth that brought him together with historical figures from Asian postwar art, such as Kim Taek Sang, Kang Kang Hoon and Kishio Suga, alongside Khairulddin Wahab.
Standing out is the 1983 Subway Drawing by Keith Haring that Tokyo’s SH Gallery is featuring alongside a screenprint. The drawing, priced at $650,000, had been acquired at Sotheby’s Amsterdam in 2005, according to the gallery. Rare in Asia, Haring’s subway drawings are probably among the most foundational bodies of work in his practice, as he began drawing in chalk on the unused black advertising panels of New York subway stations in the early 1980s, turning one of the city’s most ordinary public spaces into his first gallery show.
As usual, some of the best Fernando Boteros at Kiaf could be found at Houston’s Art of the World Gallery, which works closely with artists and estates and brought a concentrated selection ranging from paintings and watercolors to bronze and marble. Among them was the monumental 2016 After Cranach, an oil on canvas measuring 140 by 172 centimeters with a seven-figure asking price, putting the booth among the most expensive propositions at the fair. Korean collectors like Botero, while the more international audience also responds to more than the nudity, confirmed co-owner and advisor Mauricio Sampogna. The recent Botero show, “Fernando Botero: The Triumph of Form,” which closed on August 30 at the Seoul Arts Center, only further contributed to the hype. (More Boteros are on view at Opera gallery, where the Colombian artist shared the booth with blue-chip crowd-pleasers including a 1996 George Condo, Jean Dubuffet, KAWS, Keith Haring and Manolo Valdés.)
Overall, the opening day suggested just how rapidly the Korean art market has consolidated, finding a new balance between nurturing its local ecosystem and asserting its place within the broader global conversation, as international galleries, dealers and collectors remain willing to bet on its energy.
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