Beneath the rafters, 1,200 glass beads hang from thin stainless steel wires, glinting like dew caught on a spider's web. The work filling Gyeongheunggak, the main building of SK's Sunhyewon in Samcheong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, is "Web" by the internationally renowned artist Mona Hatoum. A web is a peaceful home for the spider and a killing ground for other insects. "Behind the soft and beautiful appearance, there is this sense of foreboding," the artist said.
Sunhyewon was the private residence of SK founder Chey Jong-kun. After serving as a corporate training center, it reopened last year following a renovation into a hanok, and each September, when art events cluster in the city, it hosts the Sunhyewon Art Project curated by the Podo Museum and general director Kim Hee-young. This year's exhibition, "How Are the Trembling Things," features three artists. Spread across the space where the main wooden floor sits is "Golden Blanket," a 480-by-620-centimeter work by Choi Sung-im. The artist, who has continued working by gathering and weaving everyday materials rather than paint and brushes while raising a child, wove the piece from the gold ties used to close bread bags. The luster created by trivial materials became the hanok's form of hospitality. In the first basement corridor, pieces from Kim Yun-soo's series "Surface of Wind" are placed here and there. PVC sheeting of the kind used as stroller wind covers was cut into the shapes of real people's feet and stacked thousands of layers deep. No adhesive was used. The tension between the layers holds the work firmly together. The three artists share a common approach: they begin with materials overlooked or discarded in daily life, then add repetitive labor and time to shape a new materiality. The exhibition holds a hidden virtue. It places Hatoum, a global star, and lesser-known Korean artists side by side with equal weight. Artists who had worked quietly but remained outside the spotlight were called onto the stage. The opening event on the 1st drew a full turnout of art world figures from home and abroad, including National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Director Kim Sung-hee, Seoul Museum of Art Director Choi Eun-ju, and the couple Massimiliano Gioni and Cecilia Alemani, both former artistic directors of the Venice Biennale.
Years of Built-Up Recognition and Trust Become a Springboard for Introducing Newcomers
This year marks the fifth since Kiaf, Korea's largest art fair, began running in the first week of September alongside Frieze Seoul, one of the two dominant global art fair brands. The current state of Seoul's art landscape, reshaped by what is now called "Kiaf Frieze," could be read at Sunhyewon. In the first few years after Frieze Seoul's arrival, blockbuster shows by established masters commanded attention. Using the recognition and trust built up that way as capital, the scene has now created a springboard for actively presenting artists and works that had drawn little notice. From spectacle to rediscovery. It is one example of the "how to use K-art" that five years of Kiaf Frieze has produced.
At the Samsung Foundation of Culture's Hoam Museum of Art, "Art Spectrum 2026" is under way. It is the first time the program, which the Leeum Museum of Art launched in 2001 as an exhibition to discover emerging artists, has been held at Hoam. A museum that raised its standing with shows by masters such as Louise Bourgeois, Lee Ufan and Kim Yun-shin has given over its space to young artists. Since 2024, Art Spectrum has pursued changes including various forms of international collaboration and an expansion of participating artists to include the wider Asian region. This year it was co-organized with the Paris contemporary art institution Palais de Tokyo, inviting 23 artists and teams from 10 countries. Inside and outside the museum, which is built around a traditional Korean garden and architecture, young Korean artists show their identities within the context of contemporary Asian art.
Ungyeong Gotaek, the century-old hanok of the politician Lee Jae-hyung, known by the pen name Ungyeong, opens for about two months a year, timed to the Frieze period. This year it handed the entire house over to the young artist Kim Dong-hee. To install the work, six tons of earth were dug out of the front courtyard, the attic was turned inside out, and visitors are made to wander into every corner of the house. Contemporary art burrowing into the hanok made the house itself easier to see in detail. Rather than chasing the brand value of foreign masters, it reveals the appeal of K-culture.
Drawing global collectors and museum officials to Korea is commonly called the "Frieze effect." More important is the fact that Frieze Seoul changed how Korea's "art institution infrastructure" operates. In Korea, institutional operations and commercial activity were strictly separated. Cooperation was taboo. Kiaf Frieze pushed past that line. The "Do Ho Suh" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Seoul branch, the hottest show at the moment, feeds into the acclaim for Suh's new work hung at Lehmann Maupin's Frieze Seoul booth. Those who remember the Damien Hirst solo show that drew 530,000 visitors in the first half of the year encounter a scaled-down version at the Gagosian booth. Young collectors' eyes light up at the possibility of owning works they had seen only in museums. The Sehwa Museum of Art solo show that the German master Georg Baselitz, who died in April, was preparing as his last became the first retrospective after his death. His final works draw attention not only at Thaddaeus Ropac in Hannam-dong but also at the fair. Jean-Michel Othoniel, whose aesthetic of glass beads draws gasps, held his largest solo exhibition in Korea at F1963, a converted former Kiswire plant in Suyeong-gu, Busan, while a two-person show by Othoniel and Lee Bae marking the 140th anniversary of Korea-France diplomatic relations is running at the French ambassador's residence in Seoul. Kukje Gallery brought a large group of new Othoniel works to its Kiaf booth, and Johyun Gallery hung the latest works by Lee Bae, an artist it represents. A large-scale Lee Bae solo show is also running at Museum SAN in Wonju, Gangwon Province.
The art market's circulatory structure was already confirmed last year. Mark Bradford, who set a record for the highest-priced transaction at Frieze Seoul with a work sold for $4.5 million (about 6.3 billion won), was cast in a stronger light during the same period thanks to his solo show at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. Lee Bul, newly signed by Hauser & Wirth, and Louise Bourgeois, a master who has become history, each shone brighter through exhibitions at Leeum and Hoam. When Museum SAN opened an Antony Gormley show, Thaddaeus Ropac and White Cube followed with different series by the same artist, carrying the mood all the way to the fair floor. That is why Frieze Chief Executive Simon Fox said of his choice of Seoul that "Korea has better art fair infrastructure — high-caliber museums and artist studios — than any other country in Asia." It is not that Korea lacked infrastructure. It existed, but institutions, local governments, galleries and artists who did not know how to work it have only now begun to mesh their gears around the art fair period. This year the Gwangju Biennale and Busan Biennale ran at the same time. Key figures from the global art world all turned toward Korea at once.
Visitors — the demand side of art — are changing too. People who once thought of exhibitions only in terms of museums and galleries have learned how much wider the range of choices is. They found out that small exhibition spaces run by artists themselves, nonprofit spaces and newly opened venues exist, and through Frieze-adjacent events such as "Euljiro Night" and "Samcheong Night," they learned how to enjoy art while walking the back alleys. It is a change in the infrastructure of demand. More visitors now study artists and works before seeing an exhibition. The base of Korea's art market is growing broader and thicker.
A 3.9 Billion Won Budget: A National Museum That Cannot Buy a Single Kim Whanki Dot Painting
Even as the gears mesh, there is a regrettable point: the acquisition budget of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea's only national art museum. It is a place that has become a shrine for young art lovers, comfortably clearing 500,000 visitors for single shows by Ron Mueck and Damien Hirst. Even for a museum where the current Do Ho Suh exhibition raises expectations of 700,000 visitors, allowing for daily admission caps, the annual acquisition budget is only around 5 billion won. Even that has shrunk to the 4 billion won range, and next year's budget has fallen to 3.9 billion won. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's budget proposal for next year grows 22.6%, about twice the rate for the government overall, yet the acquisition budget — arguably the museum's real asset base — is moving in the opposite direction.
The annual exhibition schedules of major museums show a clear strategy aimed at the first week of September. A structure in which art fairs, museums and even biennales exert influence on one another is new DNA that the foreign transplant Frieze grafted onto Seoul. Yet there are points where the public sector fails to support what the private sector has laid out. Beyond the national museum's thin acquisition budget, which cannot buy a single Kim Whanki dot painting, funds for purchasing works for public collections are also inadequate. Britain, where Frieze was born, is different. The Frieze Tate Fund, run in partnership with the national institution Tate, buys works at the fair with 150,000 pounds a year. Since the first fair in 2003, more than 170 works by some 100 artists have entered the national collection through it. The Contemporary Art Society's collections fund serves regional museums. At Frieze Los Angeles, the city of Santa Monica's art bank fund buys works from the fair to fill the city's public collection. Frieze New York, held in May, has combined performances by Whitney Biennial commissioned artists with the fair period and newly created a $50,000 annual museum acquisition fund for artists in its emerging section. It is a virtuous cycle in which the fair grows the host city's institutional ecosystem and institutions sustain the fair.
This is a golden age of K-culture, with K-pop and K-drama drawing the world's gaze. K-art is picking up that momentum. Now that the Kiaf Frieze effect has made Korea aware of art infrastructure it had not been able to put to use, what is needed are policy wings to make active use of it.
