In the press, there’s always a lot of ink spilled over the inaugural edition of a fair: will it make the big splash it needs to cement its place in the calendar? Its second iteration is often met with a similar question: Can it maintain the momentum from year one to second? But Year 3 tends to get less attention, as it’s business as usual.
That’s why the biggest story at the third edition of Frieze Seoul, whose VIP presentation was held on Wednesday, was a bit baseball: a change in the opening hours. The first two editions of Frieze Seoul started in the afternoon, creating a frenzy as everyone tried to see all the stalls at the fair in a few hours. This year, however, the doors opened at 11 a.m., giving the fair a somewhat quieter atmosphere today.
What should we make of the event itself? Some traders said Wednesday afternoon that it was still a little early to get a full picture of everything. There were a few sales at the end of Day 1, although it should be noted that several of these were likely pre-sold to customers, and galleries rarely disclose whether those buyers are from Korea, Asia, or Europe and the United States.
Dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who has operated a space in Seoul since 2021, said he does not pre-sell works. “It is still early in the fair and it is too early to draw any conclusions,” Ropac said in a statement distributed to the press. “So far it’s a bit slower on opening day in terms of sales compared to last year, but we’re not worried in any way how things will turn out at the end of the fair. There is a great dynamic in the art scene in Seoul and Frieze has really built its presence and arrived here.”
Ropac’s tactic appeared to pay off: His gallery reported selling a Georg Baselitz painting for 1 million euros, or about $1.11 million.
There is at least some great art to be seen here. Here’s a look at the best booths at the 2024 edition of Frieze Seoul, which runs until September 7 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center.
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Paul Pfeiffer at Paula Cooper Gallery
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
Among the most attractive works on view at Frieze Seoul is Paul Pfeiffer’s new piece Incarnador (Pampanga). The work, which occupies its own wall, features a wooden sculpture of Justin Bieber, divided into five parts: head, torso, legs, right arm and left arm. Pfeiffer was recently the subject of a mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where she displayed an earlier version of this Bieber sculpture; from time to time, the artist updates this work to reflect how Bieber looks at the time of the work’s production. For this ongoing series, Pfeiffer contributed incarnators in the Philippines, who are revered for their carved wooden sculptures of Jesus, Mary and Catholic saints. The series is born out of the artist’s fascination with pop cultural representations of masculinity and how they lead us to idolize, even worship, figures like Bieber.
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Tuan Andrew Nguyen at Galerie Quynh Contemporary Art
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s hour-long film The unburied sounds of a troubled horizon (2022) follows Nguyet, who runs a scrap yard with her mother on the north-central coast of Vietnam. He makes sculptures out of the bomb debris that still litters that part of the country, and although he initially doesn’t believe in reincarnation, we learn by the end of the film that Nguyệt was the modernist sculptor Alexander Calder in a past life. At Frieze Seoul, Nguyen continued to explore the themes covered in that film with a new massive sculpture, like Calder, made of the same bomba metal that appears in his film. Titled broken sun (2024), this piece, like the three others on view, was specially tuned by the artist and a monk to provide sound waves intended to heal all who encounter it.
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Lee Jinjin and Park Youngsook at Arario Gallery
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
The stellar works featured in this stand offer visions of the woman. Lee Jinjin presents six canvases, Visible 30-35which show a woman’s face and hands (often three rather than two) floating on a deep black background. His face is obscured by a sheet of white paper, burned at different points in each image, which reveals different parts of his face. The black paint used is also significant. Known as Leejeongbae black, it is a pigment made by Lee’s husband, the artist himself and the pigment’s namesake. On an outside wall of the booth are two provocative photographs of Park Youngsook, who appears in the MMCA’s “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” exhibit opening this week in Seoul, showing the artist’s bare body (in black and white) with her face . replaced (in color) by half an apple in one and the back of an iron in the other.
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Pacita Abad and Minouk Lim at Tina Kim Gallery
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
A textile painting by Pacita Abad and a sculpture by Minouk Lim go well together at Tina Kim’s stand. Titled To paint with a touch (1991), Abad’s work features woven collages to which he added his own abstract marks. Lim’s sculpture, Enwinded score (2022), is steeped in recent Korean history and continues a series that began with her participation in the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. She befriended a reed maker, Eui Jin Chai, who collected branches from felled trees that looked interesting to create his utilitarian objects, which he would then carve. At the time of his death, Chai left more than 1,000 of those objects unfinished; they were willing to Lim. Chai survived a massacre in 1949 that killed his older brother and younger cousin, and Lim connected this series to the Gwangju Massacre of 1980. There is almost a talismanic quality to his walking stick, which here acts as a way to mark two atrocities that occurred in 1980. Korea.
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Kingsley Gunatillake in Blueprint 12
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
New Delhi-based gallery Blueprint 12 has given its stand, in the Focus Asia section of the fair, to Sri Lankan artist Kingsley Gunatillake, whose painting and sculpture work (both of which can be seen here) focuses on the long and terrible history of Sri Lankan civil life. war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. As a witness to these atrocities, Gunatillake metabolizes the aftermath of all this war and destruction. His sculptures resembling charred books, in which he placed toy soldiers, commemorate the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981.
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Hwang Sueyon at G Gallery
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
Also in the Focus Asia section, Hwang Sueyon’s works on display focus on the fragility of the materials in his sculptures, many of which have a deceptively robust appearance. An imminent work appears to be of solid bronze; in fact, it is made from black wallpaper and is hollow inside, which means that it can fall and collapse at any time. In front of this work is a series of very laborious pieces made with sand. To make the works, the artist packs the sand, then adds layers of glue and lets them dry, a process that takes several months. All but one of the works are treated with clay to prevent them from collapsing. But many of them are partially submerged in water, leaving the untreated one completely submerged. These, too, could apparently disintegrate, albeit slowly and over time.
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Lee Kang-So in Thaddaeus Ropac
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
Lee Kang-So, who recently joined Thaddaeus Ropac’s roster, shows a sparse abstraction with few marks and a fascinating sculpture, titled Converting-10-C-145 (2010), which appears to be a clay version of an armor column that has collapsed in on itself. Both works speak to Lee’s concept of “failures,” which he considers essential to creating great art. “It’s when you make mistakes in the right way that good works are produced,” Lee said recently. Marie Claire Korea. “If you’re thinking about layout and overall composition from all kinds of traditional perspectives, you’re already off to a bad start. This has been my belief for a long time.”
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Niki de Saint Phalle at Galerie Mitterrand
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
In the Frieze Masters section, Paris-based Galerie Mitterrand is exhibiting several works by Niki de Saint Phalle. What catches their attention the most is an end-of-career job, Ganesha II (1992), which moves. Set against a bright pink, brushworked background, the half-painting, half-sculpture piece shows the eponymous Indian deity filtered through Saint Phalle’s palette. The mechanisms behind the painting, partly influenced by Jean Tingeuly, her second husband, who was known for making mechanized sculptures, are activated by a motion detector, causing the completed sculpture to break apart and then slowly come back together.
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Morag Keil at Project Native Informant
Image credit: Maximíliano Durón/ARTnews
London-based Scottish artist Morag Keil is showing The price of freedom (2024), a five-part sculpture in which a white bunny appears to emerge from a magician’s hat, completing an arc in the air before descending back to where it came from. The founder of the Native Informant Project, Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja, connected the work to our current post-financial crisis moment, where one can find a desire to break out of current boundaries in a desire for freedom. But maybe freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There is a tension in this work: the sense of liberation may not coincide with the experience of it. Maybe it’s all just an endless loop, or maybe it’s just an apt metaphor for today’s endless cycle of art fairs.
