Highlights of the Inaugural Frieze LIVE at Frieze Seoul 2024

Jeyun Moon Pat, why did you decide to introduce performance art into the Frieze Seoul programme?

Pat Lee We want to provide a platform for talented curators and artists to promote performance art to a wider audience. I have always liked activations and artistic interventions within fairs – I’ve found many thought-provoking and memorable. At the fair, performers can expect an audience that is primed and appreciative. Last year’s performances by ikkibawiKrrr as part of the Getty PST presentation at Frieze Seoul were so touching and well received that we were really convinced we should have a performance component again this year.

I am thrilled to be working with you on this since you are such a champion of performance. How did you develop your interest?

JM It began with an admiration for Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham, among others. My understanding of contemporary art is grounded in the neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and ’70s. This expanded field of art challenged institutional norms, and a common denominator among these artists, particularly from feminist perspectives, was the idea of the body as a discursive battlefield. In the late 1980s and ’90s, an institutional critique of dance emerged, leading to an interesting convergence in the early 2000s when curators aimed to accommodate this expanded field within exhibition-making. My doctoral research focused on the intersection of exhibition-making and dance in relation to the legacy of performance art of the 1960s and ’70s.

In the Frieze Seoul LIVE programme, there will be a performance in which Kim Wonyoung x Project YYIN translates Rainer’s Trio A (1978) into a wheelchair version. In the same way that Rainer challenges the conventions of dance by introducing everyday movements like walking, Becoming-dancer challenges the normality of walking from the perspective of a performer using a wheelchair. 

PL What else can you share at this point about the programme?

JM In recent years, I have been interested in how our socio-political and visual environments push the limits of language. Radical politics exploit the performativity of language, annulling its power. This led me to explore artistic practices that translate written words into embodied experiences.

For the Frieze Seoul Live programme, translation is a key concept through which poetry is approached as an open-source and collaborative medium. Poetry challenges the dichotomies of body and language, image and action, emotion and rationality. It is itself a performative act. The programme includes artists who showcase the poetic potential of bodily expression while reclaiming the physicality of language: one example is a performance by Hong Jiyoung. The Buddhist ritual for comforting the dead will be incorporated into Cha Yeonså’s performance, which involves contemporary musicians and vocalists, while Jesse Chun’s collaboration with Korean folk dancers will expand contemporary artistic language.

How do you think the live programme will complement other parts of the Frieze Seoul programme?

PL In our first year we focused primarily on the film programme, held at two offsite venues, which was a collaboration between WESS from Seoul and GYOPO from Los Angeles. In year two, we added the Frieze Artist Award commission and Frieze Film was co-curated by Serena Sungah Choo and Sung woo Kim – an ambitious presentation across four non-profit venues. We also launched Frieze Music and collaborated on the Talks programme with Kiaf and KAMS. For this third edition, we will include all these elements and introduce Frieze LIVE with both on- and offsite performance activations. 

I have really enjoyed working with the next generation of curators and providing them with an opportunity  to present their ideas to a broader global audience.

Lastly, which exhibitions around the city during Frieze Week are on your radar, Jeyun?

JM I am looking forward to the MMCA’s ‘Talking Bodies: Asian Women Artists Since the 1960s’. This will be a very ambitious project which rewrites the herstory of women artists in Asia. Also, one of the artists in the Frieze Live programme, Cha Yeonså, will have a solo exhibition related to her performance at the Seoul Artists’ Platform_New & Young. And as a curator at Art Sonje Center, I am very much looking forward to Do Ho Suh’s solo exhibition. Since his first solo show in Korea at ASJC in 2003, Suh has expanded the reach of Korean contemporary art to a global scale. Now, more than 20 years later, Suh and ASJC have partnered once again to present an overview, across the entire building, of the ‘Speculations’ series he has been working on since 2005.

PL I am incredibly proud of how Frieze Week has been able to promote the wonderful cultural offerings of the city to a broader global audience. With each edition we have seen ever more exciting projects timed to coincide with the fair and this year is no exception. Also this year, both the Busan and Gwangju Biennales open during Frieze Week. Beside the exhibitions that you mentioned, I am looking forward to seeing the solo presentations of Cha Jeamin, Bek Hyunjin and Kim Minae at Ilmin Museum of Art. Leeum will present an Anicka Yi solo exhibition and then there’s the return of ‘Art Spectrum’, this year curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija. There is also a lot of excitement about the Amore Pacific Museum of Art’s large scale exhibition with Elmgreen & Dragset.

Further Information

Frieze Seoul, COEX, 4 – 7 September 2024.

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A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room opens in the week before the fair, offering audiences a first look at the presentations and the ability to engage with the fair remotely. 

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^{Main image: Jesse Chun, Score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos, no.042823), performance with Yeonhee (Kim Hyangsooree, Ahn Yoohee), Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center ⓒ 2024, all rights reserved}