The famed Korean artist Nam June Paik was known to compare his multifarious multimedia works to bibimbap, the Korean favorite made by mixing a medley of ingredients into rice.
The dish could also describe the recent Netflix hit “KPop Demon Hunters,” Sunjung Kim, the artistic director of the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, said in a video interview. The film, about a K-pop girl group battling occult forces, is filled with elements of traditional and contemporary Korean culture. “It’s packaging everything together — music, animation, storytelling and costume,” Kim said.
To extend the metaphor just a bit further: In September, South Korea’s art world is as diverse and bountiful as bibimbap. For the second year in a row, the nation’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is marketing a Korea Art Festival that lasts the entire month, aiming to draw crowds to scores of events and exhibitions around the country, like a design biennial in Gwangju, a craft biennial in Cheongju and a calligraphy biennial in Jeonbuk State.
The festival, one of many initiatives devised to boost Korean culture at home and abroad, arrives after a tumultuous period in the country’s politics, and amid questions about the strength of the Korean art market as the international industry weathers a prolonged downturn. It also comes as the overall Asian art market changes, from Seoul to Hong Kong to Singapore.
The action kicks off with two high-profile contemporary art fairs that anchor the capital’s fall art scene: Frieze Seoul and Kiaf. Frieze Seoul, now in its fourth edition, will convene more than 120 exhibitors from almost 30 countries (Sept. 4-6), while the homegrown Kiaf will host some 175 galleries from 20 countries (Sept. 4-7) for its 24th outing. Both run at the Coex convention center in the Gangnam district; one ticket provides access to both.
Over the past decade, foreign art dealers have been betting big on Seoul, opening branches there as art sales climbed in the country. However, the Korean art market remains relatively small (it’s less than 2 percent of the global market), and by some metrics, it has been shrinking lately.
Art auctions there totaled 56.4 billion won (about $40.5 million at the current exchange rate) in the first half of 2025, down 15.3 percent from the same period in 2024 and 61.1 percent from their high in the first half of 2021, according to a study by the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS), a public organization affiliated with the culture ministry. Last year, overall sales in the country declined 15 percent, versus 12 percent globally, an art market survey from Art Basel and UBS found.
Given those trends, some previous Frieze Seoul exhibitors are sitting out this edition. “It’s a tough time, and I think galleries, obviously, have to make choices,” the fair’s director, Patrick Lee, said. The absences create openings for newcomers, like De Sarthe (of Hong Kong and Scottsdale, Ariz.) and the Breeder (Athens). “I’ve been the beneficiary of that,” Lee, a former dealer, said. “You always look for opportunities as you get your foot in the door.”
Art Basel Hong Kong remains the dominant fair in Asia by prestige and size (drawing about 240 galleries this year), but the field is in flux. Young fairs in Singapore and Japan are competing for exhibitors, and the Taipei Dangdai fair, which started in 2019, just canceled its 2026 edition; its exhibitor list had shrunk over the years.
All four mega-dealers are returning to this year’s Frieze Seoul. Gagosian is stocking its booth with blue-chip names, while staging its third pop-up show at the headquarters of the beauty giant Amorepacific, this time with the art world superstar Takashi Murakami.
“We want a signal that cuts through the noise,” Nick Simunovic, who leads Gagosian’s Asian business, said of the annual display. (Amorepacific also has a museum, which is hosting a Mark Bradford exhibition through Jan. 25.)
Collecting in South Korea has broadened during his 18 years at Gagosian, Simunovic said, after previously being driven by the chaebol, the families behind many of the country’s conglomerates. The Korean market “is highly attuned to changes, whether that be in the macroeconomic environment or the political context,” he said. “The foreign-exchange rate, I think, has a huge bearing on how acquisitive people are of international art.”
The won has weakened against the dollar over the past few years, and an alleged Ponzi scheme involving art has grabbed headlines, but there is finally a measure of stability on the political front. Lee Jae Myung was elected president in June after his predecessor, Yoon Suk Yeol, was impeached and arrested following his attempt to impose martial law last December.
“Korea went through huge political uncertainty with the new presidential election,” Tina Kim, a Korean-born, New York-based art dealer said, “so there was a moment of halt, but I think things are being normalized in terms of the overall market.”
Kim’s Frieze stand will include work by Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929-2021), a painter of beguiling water droplets who has a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, and the fabric artist Lee ShinJa, 94, who just opened a survey at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California.
Even outside the fall fairs, international dealers are continuing to enter the South Korean market, despite the uncertainty around demand.
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff of Paris, and Meyer Riegger of Berlin, Karlsruhe, Germany and Basel, Switzerland, have teamed up on a Seoul space, and last year, Galerie Eva Presenhuber of Switzerland began staging presentations in a showroom at the local P21 gallery. The Canadian painter Steven Shearer will get that spotlight during Frieze.
Yet Presenhuber, who is based in Zurich, ruled out a Seoul branch. “It’s too far away, and you would have to have real staff sitting there,” she said. At Frieze, her booth will include works by established figures, like the American artists Joe Bradley and Sam Falls and the Swiss painter-sculptor Ugo Rondinone.
“It’s a bit more work now to get sales done,” Presenhuber said, when asked about the global art market. However, “we’re positive,” she added, “because crises come and go.”
That seems to be the spirit of Korean officials and corporations, which are still spending on art initiatives.
The Hanwha Group conglomerate plans to open a branch of the Centre Pompidou in Seoul next year, and the national government is overseeing the conversion of an old power plant in the city into a culture center, à la Tate Modern in London. The Seoul Museum of Art just opened a seventh branch, for photography, with an eighth location, for new media, on the way in November.
The number of art museums in the country grew from 175 to 278 between 2011 and 2023, according to KAMS (which organizes the Korea Art Festival), and people are showing up. The flagship Seoul branch of the National Museum of Korea (there are 13 more around the country) was the eighth-most-visited museum in the world in 2024, according to an Art Newspaper survey. Some of its merchandise with imagery related to “KPop Demon Hunters” has been selling out.
During Frieze Week, some of the most ambitious new shows will be at museums backed by the Samsung Foundation of Culture — the Leeum in Seoul is championing the storied Korean artist Lee Bul (Sept. 4-Jan. 4), and the Hoam, in Yongin, is showing Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), from Aug. 30-Jan. 4.
The current efflorescence in the Korean art scene has roots that go back decades. South Korea put in effect policies to support it following the economic downturn in the late 1990s, said Yeon Shim Chung, a professor of art history at Hongik University in Seoul. “It’s almost like in America, when they had a Great Depression, they had New Deal policies to support artists,” she said.
“The really long-term investment started 20-plus years ago, and I’m very impressed,” Tina Kim said, mentioning efforts to establish Korean art galleries at U.S. museums. “It’s finally working.”
Art Sonje — a pioneering contemporary art venue — has operated for that entire period. With Frieze this year, it is presenting performances, with a focus on artists who identify as female or genderqueer, and it is marking the 30th anniversary of the first exhibition mounted on its grounds with an unusual show by the Argentine sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas (Sept. 3-Feb. 1).
Villar Rojas has blocked the museum’s front entrance with earth, disabled its climate controls and removed temporary walls, stripping it to its bones and planting inside a garden and fantastical sculptures. “Usually a celebration makes something beautiful, but this is a different way of thinking about our history,” Sunjung Kim, the artistic director, said.
Villar Rojas said he is treating the building as “some sort of sculpture in itself,” describing the project as “a ghost sailing ship.” The museum will admit only 30 people an hour, a radical move given that Frieze Seoul drew 70,000 visitors last year.
But even if comparatively few will see his exhibition, Villar Rojas seemed to capture the ethos of the country when he said, “I don’t think museums should still be time machines for the preservation of experiences. They should be places where you produce.”
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