The 5 Best Shows to See During Frieze Seoul 2022

Busan Biennale 2022, ‘We, On the Rising Wave’

Various venues

On view 3 September through 6 November

Just a few hours by road or rail from Seoul is the city of Busan, host to the Busan Biennale, founded in 2018. This year’s edition, which launches during Frieze Week Seoul, is curated by Haeju Kim, formerly of Art Sonje Center. Its title, ‘We, On the Rising Wave’, alludes to the city’s historic role as a port, its surrounding landscape of rolling hills, and ideas of global interconnectedness through the movement of people and technological change. Featuring 18 Korean and 46 international artists, this year’s biennial unfolds across four sites: the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, located at the mouth of the Nakdong River; the former shipbuilding hub of Yeongdo Island; the Choryang Sanbok Road district, whose roots lie in the communities displaced by the Korean War and Japanese occupation; and the old warehouse at Busan Port’s Pier 1, a 4,000-m2 space that has never previously been open to the public. Among those showing in this epic setting are the young French artist Tabita Rezaire, whose practice is informed by the discourse surrounding contemporary ‘wellness’ and traditions such as kundalini yoga, and Korean Hyun Nahm, who last year was the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the Atelier Hermès space in Seoul, and whose sculptures use cheap industrial materials to conjure enigmatic sculptural landscapes, inspired by the ancient tradition of suseok (scholar’s stones).

Elsewhere, featured artists include Seoul-born, Amsterdam-based Mire Lee, who participated in this year’s Venice Biennale with Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022), an installation of alien-like organic sculptures. (Lee’s practice was profiled by Tate curator Alvin Li in the September issue of frieze.) Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg, whose participation in the Busan Biennale coincides with her first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, presents her recent film Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), which roves epically from the Central Asian Steppe to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, across fields of mass potato farming. Like the biennial itself, Rottenberg’s work shows how disruption can ultimately connect us, like waves re-joining the swell of the ocean.

Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, ‘Seoul Weather Station’

Art Sonje Center

On view through 20 November

This Korean artist duo has established a significant following, both at home and internationally, thanks to their highly imaginative practice. Based on thorough research and dialogues across a range of fields — including science, literature, architecture and pop culture — their work takes many forms. At Frieze London in 2017, for instance, they presented Freedom Village — a series of images reconstructing life in Daeseong-dong, an enclave of UN citizens located in the DMZ but living outside of government jurisdiction since the Korean War armistice in 1953 — while, as part of their 2018 exhibition at Tate Liverpool, they installed manhole covers both within the gallery and outside in the historic Royal Albert Dock, bearing the words: ‘My future will reflect a new world.’ But the duo is particularly known for their poetic short films, like the dreamy sci-fi The Ways of Folding Space & Flying (2015), with which they represented Korea at the Venice Biennale, or the apocalyptic News from Nowhere: Eclipse (2022), part of their recent exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, in which a sailor battles the seas on a tiny boat, searching for survivors. Entitled ‘Seoul Weather Station’, their exhibition at Art Sonje Center promises a similarly powerful insight into the current climate crisis.

‘Summer Love’

SONGEUN

On view through 24 September

Designed by renowned architects Herzog and de Meuron, the new SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation building, which opened in 2021, is a great sculptural wedge that soars above Dosan Daero. Its concrete facade is imprinted with the texture of pine bark in a nod to its name, which means ‘hidden pine tree’. SONGEUN’s regular ‘Summer Love’ exhibition series showcases rising local talent in a celebration of the season’s joy and promise. For the 2022 edition, participants include 13 practitioners who previously exhibited in the former SongEun ArtCube space for emerging artists: Mijung Lee, for instance, whose charming paintings play with sculptural depth and cartoon flatness, and Minjung Kim, who adapts traditional calligraphy techniques to create delicate abstractions. Also on display are works by Ahram Kwon, winner of the SONGEUN Art Award Grand Prize, in which metal sculptures, mirrors and video screens combine to create a sense of elegant disorientation. The exhibition features esteemed performance artist Kun-Yong Lee, co-founder of the influential Space and Time group, whose work responded to the authoritarianism of 1970s Korea. The artist will present 50 new works and conduct a special live performance during Frieze Week Seoul.

Winter Gyeoul Kim, ‘As if singing at your own pace’

Project Space Sarubia

On view through 27 September

The Seoul art ecosystem boasts a number of initiatives that support emerging artists. The annual Doosan Artist Award, for example, provides generous grants and exhibition support to two Korean practitioners under the age of 40 working in performance and fine art. Past winners include Kim Heecheon (2016), whose intelligent video installations exploring the intertwining of surveillance technology and identity have subsequently been shown at the Istanbul and Gwangju biennials, as well as at museums from San Francisco to Manila. Keep an eye out for last year’s winners, the three-person collective eobchae. Meanwhile, Project Space Sarubia was established in 1999 with the mission to support experimental artistic practices across the spectrum through a variety of programmes. These have ranged from the ‘Insight’ project, which addresses the role of alternative art spaces and international dialogues within the Korean scene, to Sarubia Outreach & Support, which marshals curators, critics and other practitioners to offer meaningful support to artists over the medium- and long-term, whether championing mid-career artists, offering guidance for those wishing to situate their practices beyond the Seoul context, or providing advice to those seeking to make formal or thematic pivots in their work. Sarubia’s flagship project is an open call for artists — regardless of age, career stage or medium — to mount an exhibition at the Project Space. This September, the selected artist is Winter Gyeoul Kim, whose works on canvas combine rich, gestural brushstrokes with glitchy, abstract forms that seem to reflect both the natural and computergenerated worlds.

Hito Steyerl, ‘A Sea of Data’

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA)

On view through 18 September

The title of Hito Steyerl’s exhibition at MMCA — the acclaimed, Berlin-based artist’s first major museum survey in Asia — is taken from an essay she wrote in 2017. In ‘A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition’, Steyerl begins with an image found among the highly classified US National Security Agency files, leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. Though labelled ‘secret’, the image is a seemingly unreadable grey blur. Steyerl asks: ‘Doesn’t it look like a shimmering surface of water in the evening sun?’ Springboarding from this idea of a ‘sea of data’, she questions the political implications of what gets fished out as a meaningful ‘signal’ and what is ignored as mere ‘noise’ or ‘dirty data’. This distinction ‘resonates with the wider question of political recognition’: who is identified as a citizen — as a person — and who is not.

Steyerl’s videos can be understood as extended visual essays, working through associations between images and ideas to pose broad questions about our current and future worlds. The 23 films that comprise this landmark exhibition, spanning three decades of the artist’s work, feature a constellation of surprising cultural, economic and technological phenomena. Slapstick scenes of robots failing allude to the intermeshing of hi-tech and the military-industrial complex, while the adapted logo of the luxury fashion house Balenciaga becomes a prism through which to view social change in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A new MMCA commission, Animal Spirits (2022), connects the crypto-creations of the ‘metaverse’ with palaeolithic cave painting. While Steyerl’s best works are always meticulously researched, their power ultimately lies in their openness. ‘The unique strength of visual art is that no one can realistically claim to fully understand it,’ Steyerl said at the show’s launch event in May. ‘There will be always something that you can debate.’

^{Main image: Hito Steyerl, Animal Spirits, 2022. Courtesy: the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Esther Schipper, Berlin, and MMCA, Seoul}