Korea's Leading Artists at Frieze Seoul 2024

Seoul Artists

Born and working in the Korean capital, Haneyl Choi, showing with P21, makes minimalist sculptures and installations that explore queer and national identities. Choi’s pieces often incorporate humble everyday materials such as polystyrene blocks, and he frequently uses metal that is bent into outlines, suggesting a dislocation between normative social roles and creative practice. He has also made versions of the traditional Kotrren folding room screen (byung poong), problematizing its function of dividing and deliminating spaces with the addition of extraneous and apparently random forms and objects.

The works of Seoul-born Kyungah Ham (Kukje) politicize cultural production, with the invisible backstories of her materials spotlighted in the descriptions. For instance, her 2018–19 work What you see is the unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities SSK 06-03, is listed as being made of ‘North Korean hand embroidery, silk threads on cotton, middle man, smuggling, bribe, tension, anxiety, censorship, ideology, wooden frame, approx. 1,200 hrs / 1 person’. Ham’s works engage in the material prosperity that is often the byproduct of war and political turmoil, and its ultimate cost to everyday people. 

Kang Seok Ho (Tina Kim Gallery) died at the age of just 50 in 2021, leaving an imposing legacy of painted works that reflect his balance of figuration, abstraction and time-based practice. Kang actively distanced himself from his subjects, using repetitive brushstrokes and close cropping on details to refute narrative: the importance of the work was in its making, not in its story. Kang’s approach also alludes to Asian landscape painting in their attempt to analyse the structure of what is seen, and how.

Busan Artists

Busan, the second largest city and the biggest port in South Korea, has historically acted as a point of arrival, departure and cultural cross-pollination, and home since 1981 to the Busan Biennale (17 August – 20 October 2024). Lee Ufan (Pace and Mennour), for example, the leading figure of mono-ha movement, comes from Haman-gun, not far above Busan, where he spent most of his youth; shortly after enrolling in Seoul National University, he left to study in Japan. A 1988 painting by Lee, who is presenting a sculpture exhibition in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 27 October, is be featured at Pace Gallery’s booth this year, while a later work from 2013 is being shown by Mennour.

Busan-born and based, Jeon Joonho (Gallery Hyundai) probes existential questions through images of humanity lost to Korea’s political history and economic expansion. The Black Frame (2020) and Hamlets and Fields of Home (2020) are made of stained glass windows and doorframes that the artist collected from abandoned houses in Daeyeon-dong, a well-known area of redevelopment, but formerly home to migrants ever since the Korean War. Through the literal displacement of the glass, Jeon captures the experience of being excluded from your roots within a relentlessly changing urban landscape.

Daegu Artists

You could miss Daegu as a major art destination in Korea, but the metropolitan south-eastern city is famous for modern and avant-garde artists, as well as significant collectors’ groups. Daegu-based gallery Leeahn is showcasing works by generation-spanning artists from the city. The Wind Is Blowing (2023), a free-flowing abstract painting by Lee Kang-So, one of the key figures of the Korean avant-garde in the 1970s, addresses themes of indeterminacy and cosmic holism. That baton is then handed over to Shin Kyung-Chul, whose dreamlike acrylic-and-pencil landscape, T-HERE, hovers between the familiar and the unsettling, and between abstraction and figuration, with themes of atemporal fantasy. 

Gwangju Artists 

Gwangju has been celebrated historically for its tradition of arts and culture, and more recently in the last 50 years for its role in protesting against military dictatorship in the 1980s. It’s also home to the Gwangju Biennale (the first in Asia), whose 2024 edition runs 7 September – 1 December.

One of the leading figures in Korean modernism, Kim Whanki (1913–1974) is often discussed in relation to his time in Tokyo, Paris and New York. He orginally came from the south-west coast, though, outside Gwangju. Kim was influential in reinterpreting abstract art with more humble themes rooted in his immediate sphere, such as mountains, rivers and the moon. He also famously helped the particularly rebellious Yun Hyong-keun (showing with PKM at Frieze Seoul 2024), his future son-in-law, return to his university after it refused to take him back for protesting against US involvement in the country’s schools. Although Yun’s later style is seen as more ‘mature’ and ‘calm’ than his impassioned earlier works, in response to the 1980 May police retaliation against the Gwangju pro-democracy movement, he painted series of collapsing columns, bleeding.

Further Information

Frieze Seoul, COEX, 4 – 7 September 2024.

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^{Main image: Kim Whanki, Moon and Mountain, 1967. Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 60.9 cm. Courtesy: Hakgojae}