Art insiders predict it will be a big year for the twin fairs of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf Seoul, open to the public from Thursday till the weekend.
The two events — which have run in tandem since Frieze came to Seoul in 2022 — continue to exert a strong influence outside their home in the Coex center, as more openings, events and activities spring up around them, and even outside Seoul itself.
Kiaf, a homegrown fair founded in 2002, will host some 175 galleries, primarily based in and around South Korea, and close on Sunday. Frieze, which has been in partnership with Kiaf, will have more than 130 galleries from 30 countries and run until Saturday. Last year, Frieze Seoul drew 70,000 visitors and Kiaf 82,000.
Diana Martinez, an art editor and consultant who has lived in Seoul since 2018 and has attended past Frieze events, said the art week had grown significantly since Frieze Seoul was founded.
“The partnership between the two major fairs opened Seoul more fully to the international art calendar, and its impact on the ecosystem has been substantial, not just symbolic,” Martinez said in an email interview, adding that the addition of Frieze changed the thinking of galleries, museums and collectors.
“What used to be concentrated at the start of September now extends into a fuller month of programming,” she added.
“It is no longer just a trade show inside a convention hall,” said Kuho Jung, the creative director for this year’s edition of Kiaf. “It has evolved into a dynamic, citywide art week that merges heritage with contemporary culture.”
This year, thanks to factors at home and abroad — the opening of the biennales in Busan and Gwangju around the time of Kiaf and Frieze, and the shift of New York’s The Armory Show out of a competing early September time slot — there may be more international visitors spending more time exploring the Korean art scene than ever before.
K-Everything
Vivienne Chow, an art writer and cultural strategist who has previously contributed to The New York Times, has witnessed the art fair scenes develop both in South Korea and in her native Hong Kong, which has been the regional market leader even since before Art Basel arrived there in 2013.
Hong Kong’s art week (or month, depending on whom you ask) — which grew out of events orbiting the mother ship of the Basel fair — has long claimed the spotlight, with a flurry of high-end auctions, international gallery shows and parties. In terms of numbers, it is still larger and more international than Seoul’s. This March, Art Basel Hong Kong hosted 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories, drawing more than 91,000 visitors. That same week, Art Central had 117 galleries showing at a venue just a walk down the city’s harborfront.
But back in 2021, Chow wrote in ArtNet that Kiaf’s record sales and its anticipated partnership with Frieze were “setting high hopes for the South Korean capital to become the next art hub in Asia.”
Since then, Chow has witnessed further growth of the Korean market.
When she was doing a talk co-hosted by Frieze Seoul and Kiaf last year, it made her think back to how the art scene had developed in her hometown.
”I couldn’t help but think about the beginnings of Hong Kong,” Chow said in a video interview from London, where she currently lives. “There are lots of similarities and differences.”
One difference, she said, was the art scene’s role within South Korea’s larger culture and entertainment ecosystem.
“South Korea has a very clear strategy on culture,” she said. “There’s K-drama, K-cinema, K-everything. And art is a thing that they realize they can also do.”
When Chow attended the first Frieze Seoul in 2022, she and other foreign visitors were wowed by the celebrity appearances: the “Squid Game” stars Lee Jung-jae and Lee Byung-hun, plus the rapper Psy, whose viral hit “Gangnam Style” is memorialized by a bronze statue outside the Coex center.
“Korea just became a hip place to travel to,” Chow said.
While celebrities have definitely cropped up in subsequent years, they are no longer the main focus, as the art week has, in Chow’s words, become more “mature.”
Jung of Kiaf, who started in the fashion industry before moving into the art world, said that “Korea’s creative momentum is deeply interconnected; fashion, visual arts and design share the same cultural DNA.”
“The global spotlight on Korean pop culture and fashion has naturally drawn international collectors and curators to Seoul,” he said.
Exploring Neighborhoods
The 2025 opening of Frieze House Seoul, on a residential street in the Yaksu neighborhood, gave the London-based art organization and fair operator a permanent footprint in South Korea. The exhibition space now has two new nature-themed shows running until Sept. 19: “Woods Lands Meadows,” held in collaboration with Paula Cooper Gallery, features American postwar artists, while “Invisible Forest,” presented with Yumekoubou Gallery, foregrounds a large-scale installation by the Japanese bamboo artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV.
Frieze is expanding into the city in another way, with a large-scale interactive project by the British artist Ryan Gander. For “The Find Seoul,” 16,000 collectible tokens were hidden in four neighborhoods, for the public to find, through Sept. 10.
Those areas, incidentally, are the locations where Frieze is holding “Neighborhood Nights,” a series of evening events beginning on Monday night in Euljiro. These evenings, which can include show openings, cocktail receptions and artist appearances, will continue until 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. in Hannam on Tuesday, Cheongdam on Wednesday and Samcheong on Thursday.
According to Patrick Lee, the director of Frieze Seoul since its founding in 2022, this program has expanded to include about 50 venues this year.
Lee said in an email interview that his personal favorite among the four neighborhoods was Euljiro, which, he said, was home to “small bars, countless hole-in-the-wall restaurants and loud, open-air spots.”
Despite the area’s nickname of “Hipjiro,” Lee said it was still “the least gentrified of the bunch,” compared with the other three. It is still home to active industrial workshops.
Yagwang, the Seoul art collective founded by Terri Kim and In Jeon that won this year’s Frieze Seoul Artist Award, called Euljiro “a neighborhood we draw a great deal of inspiration from.”
“In the 1980s, people used to say that if you gathered Euljiro’s technicians together, they could build a submarine,” the duo said in a written response.
The duo, both in their early 30s, create sexually-charged works, like their video “LATE(X)” (2022). Their sculptures, installations and performances often address topics related to subcultures and queerness.
On Tuesday, the evening’s activities will take place in Hannam, an upscale neighborhood that houses the Leeum Museum of Art, an institution run by the Samsung Foundation of Culture, along with the Seoul branch of Pace, the New York mega-gallery.
From Hannam, the crowds might well spill into Itaewon, the city’s most foreign-influenced neighborhood and a popular nightlife spot.
To coincide with Frieze’s V.I.P. day, the action moves on Wednesday to Cheongdam, a neighborhood which, like the Coex center where the fairs are held, is in the high-end Gangnam district.
The “Neighborhood Nights” program ends on Thursday in the Samcheong neighborhood, where the singer Roy Kim and D.J. Apro are set to perform at Gallery Hyundai. A few blocks away is the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The museum, which is holding a major retrospective of the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, will be open till 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Samcheong, which is near the 14th-century Gyeongbokgung Palace, is Chow’s personal favorite among the four neighborhoods.
“Walking that area near the palace is really good fun,” she said. “There are well-known places, but it’s also where you can dive into the local scene.
“One year, Kukje Gallery had a public party — like an actual public one, where you could just walk in — and for refreshments they had the biggest pile of chicken wings I’d ever seen. It was the best thing.”
Across the Country
Martinez, the art consultant, has seen increased interest in the art scenes outside of Seoul since 2022.
“What strikes me is how many art professionals and collectors are building multicity itineraries now — flying into Seoul, but building a trip around Gwangju, Busan and even other regions — instead of just flying in for Coex and leaving,” she said, using the name of the convention center as shorthand for Kiaf and Frieze Seoul.
Frieze Film is strengthening these regional ties by cooperating with the Busan Biennale to present free viewings in Gangnam of short films by artists chosen to present new commissions at this year’s biennale. One highlight will be works by Moe Satt, a Burmese artist who lives in Europe, and who uses his body to comment on political resistance.
That political edge is reflected in many of the new Korean shows. The Busan Biennale, in the beachside city about a three-hour high-speed train ride from Seoul, opened on Saturday with the theme of “Dissident Chorus,” and runs through Nov. 1. It will be followed by the opening this coming Saturday of the Gwangju Biennale in the city in the country’s southwest, which began in 1995 to commemorate a pro-democracy uprising there (through Nov. 15).
Chow found Seoul’s events to be “very grounded in the local art scene” — largely because of Frieze’s partnership with Kiaf, which is run by the Galleries Association of Korea.
“There are hundreds of galleries in Korea,” Chow said. “And even Seoul itself is very spread out with big museums and different clusters of galleries. South Korea has a well-established scene; it’s just waiting to be discovered.”
