Kate Sutton round Frieze Seoul 2023

IN THE 1930S, a savvy developer embarked on a real-estate venture in Samcheong, a neighborhood in the heart of Seoul that was once home to a six-hundred-year-old village. Using modern materials for an urban update to the traditional Korean building style, the company created the Bukchon Hanok Village, a tony residential area whose narrow winding streets are now firmly on the tourist map.

On Monday of Seoul Art Week, Various Small Fires hosted a reception in one of Bukchon’s hanoks, whose basement had been retooled as a viewing room for a suite of painted prints by Kyungmi Shin. Those who snuck upstairs were greeted to even more delights, including a misty Will Gabaldón painting that looked like it might have just drifted in through the window. Our hostess, Lucia Cho, the force behind a number of Seoul’s Michelin-starred restaurants, filled me in on the history of her family’s luxury dinnerware company, KwangJuYo, which was founded in the 1960s after her grandfather had observed an international appreciation for traditional Korean craft that he felt was missing at home. “It’s like Koreans learned to revalue some of their own heritage after all the interest from abroad,” she explained as my eyes swept over the collection of designer heels perched just outside the terrace door.

On paper, the arrival of Frieze Seoul might suggest this kind of meeting of minds. Rather than rival the homegrown Korean International Art Fair (KIAF), the London-born event opted to become bunkmates, taking the third floor of the COEX convention center while KIAF stays settled on the first. While Frieze may be capitalizing on the sudden rise of global gallery franchises, Seoul’s scene has reliably nourished its mainstay galleries—Kukje, Hyundai, and PKM among them—for decades.

“When I first came here, I remember being astonished by the collections people had in their homes,” Thaddaeus Ropac recalled over dinner that night at the Korea Furniture Museum, a hilltop assembly of exquisite architectural specimens outfitted and maintained as a labor of love by collector Chyung Mi-sook. Ensconced in the garden, I chatted with Sarah Rustin and Flavin Judd—who curated the show of his father Donald Judd’s work on view at Ropac’s Seoul outpost—while gently people-watching a crowd that included Hans Ulrich Obrist, Maja Hoffmann, Norman and Elena Foster, and a host of preternaturally beautiful young locals. “The K-pop stars love Thaddaeus,” laughed gallery director José Castañal—an observation indirectly confirmed during Ropac’s toast, when he mentioned that BTS’s RM had dropped by the show earlier that day to share how much he had enjoyed MoMA’s Judd retrospective.

In recent years the K-Pop “idols” have been rather savvily mobilized as docents for institutions like SEMA, MMCA, and Leeum, with reels of pretty young things circulating on chat platforms. (Accidentally crashing a private reception at PKM, I watched one gamine teenager get filmed approaching the door of the gallery three separate times, tossing back a smile as she reached for a handle she never actually touched.) That night, the glitterati descended on Paradis for Frieze’s opening party, but the combination of its far-flung location and the grueling taxi shortage—“Sixty percent of taxi drivers quit last year,” one veteran of the scene bemoaned—kept most of the jetlagged visitors closer to their hotels. When I ran into Art Basel’s Alia Al Senussi the next day at MMCA, she shook her head, beaming: “Literally every celebrity was there. Actors, singers, you name it.”

“I sat next to someone from Blackpink,” shrugged Susan May, White Cube’s global artistic director, when I stopped by the London staple’s new digs. “But it’s not like I knew who she was.” May was in town to curate “The Embodied Spirit,” a lyrical group show that concluded with a stirring pairing of Berlinde De Bruyckere and Tracey Emin. “We thought it might be a bit too gritty for Seoul, but it turns out Tracey has fangirls here.” Somehow, I was not shocked.

White Cube is just one of a number of recent transplants, including Esther Schipper, Gladstone, Peres Projects, and Ropac, who have joined long(er)-timers Perrotin, Pace, Lehmann Maupin, and Various Small Fires in setting up outposts in the South Korean capital, while galleries like Sprueth Magers and Lisson tested the waters with well-placed pop-ups. This influx has coincided with an explosion of both upscale private museums (looking at you, Leeum) and scrappy artist-run spaces, as well as the rise of a new generation of homegrown galleries—Jason Haam, P21, Whistle—to expand the map of the city’s art world beyond the central Samcheong district. The Frieze/KIAF program featured spotlight nights for hotspots Cheongdam and Hannam-dong, while most of the parties took place in Itaewon, an enclave of gay bars, kebab shops, vegan cafes, and a dive called the Grand Ole Opry (after writer Andrew Russeth teased that there might be line dancing, I, a Nashville native, dragged my ass over only to find three men sharing a melancholy round to Garth Brooks’s “The Dance”). “Itaewon’s seen as where the foreigners live, not the real Seoul,” my colleague warned me when I enthused about the all-night bibimbap bar. Filmmaker Yesolbi Kim was more blunt: “A lot of people have died here.” It took me some time to realize she was referring to last Halloween’s nightmarish crowd stampede, still a fresh wound for the city.

The crown prince of Itaewon’s party scene was Our Week, a four-day event organized by P21, White Noise, and CAVA LIFE. A Korean cousin of the hybrid hangout/exhibition Basel Social Club, Our Week (named after the old Our Bakery) brought contributions from Carlos/Ishikawa, Kiang Malingue, Vacancy, and White Noise, to a building still in the process of renovation. “Apparently they only put in the windows last week,” PHD Group’s Ysabelle Cheung shrugged, admiring the immaculate storefront. At a multigallery brunch Tuesday morning, the vibe was hipsters-and-hummus, but for that evening’s grand opening, the terraced chillout spaces got steamy. Literally. “I kid you not, I think they were boiling a giant pot of kimchi soup or something,” someone reported, trying to reconcile with the tropical climes of the common space.

Whether it was the exaggerated humidity or the still reasonable hour, I couldn’t tell if the party was starting up or winding down, but the rumor was that Koreans tend to tuck in early. “Look, it’s just the internationals here,” one friend had hooted an hour before, waving a hand around the rooftop bar of the Mondrian—cloyingly called Privilege—where Sadie Coles, Jason Haam, Taka Ishii, Karma, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, and François Ghebaly (there only in spirit) all teamed up for a cocktail reception. I tested the theory on Katie Sangmin Lee—busy with Rirkrit Tiravanija’s solo show at Boontheshop—later outside the 7-11 across from Our Week. “That’s not true at all!” She laughed. “What day is it? Tuesday? Well, wait until Thursday. Koreans all go out on Thursdays.”

Wednesday brought with it the synchronized fair openings. Back in Bukchon, Cho had told me that the key is to always pick the second-highest house on a hill: “You’re protected from the elements, but you also get the view.” For the past few years, Seoul has been sitting pretty in its auxiliary hub status. With Hong Kong seemingly on the road to recovery after a rocky few years, art market speculators who went all in on the Korean capital are right to be a little wary. Last year’s inaugural Frieze fair wasn’t the smoothest, and director Patrick Lee had worked hard to address shortcomings where he could. But some things just can’t be helped. More than once this week I heard visitors yearn for Hong Kong’s “orderliness” (a sentiment most often expressed while attempting to organize a dinner or call a Kakao cab.) The thing about Seoul, though, as someone observed, is that each of the spaces feel distinctly their own.

That ethos extended to Frieze, which was laid out in two parts like a motorcycle and its side car, a section whose lighting was bafflingly yellow-tinted; Piss Christ, but make it art fair. In spirit, however, things were sprightly. While the overlap with New York’s Armory Show (Frieze’s acquisition of which still left little more than head-scratching) didn’t help lure many American or European collectors over, David Zwirner, Max Falkenstein, Eva Presenhuber, and Esther Schipper were nevertheless front and center at their booths, eager to welcome new clientele. Having briefly chatted up Busan Biennale co–artistic directors Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, I stumbled into a murder of curators—Jessica Morgan, Michelle Kuo, Wong Binghao, Aaron Cezar, and Phil Tinari—just outside the Modern Institute, where the specially commissioned small-scale Walter Price panels had all already been snapped up. “We’ve got a Jim Lambie floor piece under this carpet, all ready to go for tomorrow,” director Andrew Hamilton revealed, tapping the floor with his foot. “At least, I hope it’s still okay?” Jessica Silverman was briskly selling her solo booth of works by Woody de Othello, while another surefire hit was the ROH Projects/Whistle collaboration, where Tromarama riffed on a painting by Kyoungtae Kim to create a papaya-toned wallpaper of an abstracted fingerprint. How did they pull off such an effortless pairing? “We met having a cigarette at an art fair,” ROH founder Jun Tirtadji confessed, grinning at Whistle’s Kyungmin Lee. “It was as simple as that.”

Less simply, many of the regional galleries were pulling double duty at KIAF two floors down. I swung by Page the Gallery and Peres Projects before hitting Hyundai, where Ryan Gander had parked a baby blue Porsche, a tiny animatronic mosquito quivering in miniature death throes on its hood. A suspiciously similar car—real mosquitos—was parked outside LightRoom that night, where Hyundai was hosting a Sung Neung Kyung performance that saw roughly a hundred non-Koreans simultaneously reading newspapers in their native tongue. While there was a party planned for afterward (and someone had shoved a yellow envelope of drink tickets in my hand, assuming I had to be a performer), out of force of habit/lack of cab, I opted for Tolga’s Fairclub, which was cohosted by P21, Commonwealth & Council, Vacancy, and Chateau Shatto at Itaewon’s BDBM, a very walkable distance from my hotel. There were drink coupons there as well, ensuring for a long and rowdy evening. (And it wasn’t even Thursday.)

The rest of the week was a blur of performances, talks, and openings, but my highlight was a Friday afternoon tour of “Checkpoint,” a group exhibition curated by ArtSonje’s Sunjung Kim as part of the DMZ OPEN Festival. “Highlight” is a weird word when you are talking about an in-fact-heavily-militarized “demilitarized” zone. But seventy years since the division of Korea, the border has fallen into a kind of Tarkovsky state, with nature turning the vacant propaganda villages into Pierre-Huyghes-in-waiting. On the hour-long drive up to the site, curator Jina Kim admitted that the DMZ is more of an abstraction for the younger generation. The exhibition—which featured murals by it-collective ikkibawiKrrr, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho’s gripping video Freedom Village, 2017–23, and some plaintive tent paintings by Jaeseok Lee—essentially prompted artists to respond to a phantom limb they had no memory of ever using.

Pulling into the DMZ, I hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t an amusement park with a giant swinging pirate ship. Nor those banners for the upcoming marathon, with that rather ill-conceived logo of electric-green figures sprinting into the distance. Nor that hillside dotted in colorful pinwheels, nor the Dunkin’ Donuts at the welcome center. The appetite for spectacle in a land of none (literally) was its own kind of unsettling, with the main attraction being a row of rooftop binoculars at the Dora Observatory, where a tour group had excitedly landed on a lone rice farmer in a field. At the conclusion of the tour, there was a gift shop hawking branded coffee mugs and grenade-shaped coin purses. The disjuncture made me think back to what Lucia Cho was saying about connecting with your own history through how it’s peddled to an other. I bought a magnet.

— Kate Sutton

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