Within the press, there’s at all times a whole lot of ink spilled over a good’s inaugural version: Will it make the massive splash it must to be able to cement its place on the calendar? Its sophomore iteration tends to be met with an analogous query: Can it maintain the momentum of yr one into yr two? However Yr 3 tends to realize much less discover, because it’s enterprise as ordinary.
That’s why the most important story to come back out of third version of Frieze Seoul, whose VIP preview was held on Wednesday, was a little bit of insider baseball: a shift within the opening time. The primary two editions of Frieze Seoul kicked off within the afternoon, setting off a frenzy as everybody tried to see the entire truthful’s cubicles in just some hours. This yr, nonetheless, the doorways opened at 11 a.m., giving the truthful a little bit of a calmer vibe in the present day.
What ought to we make of the occasion itself? Just a few sellers mentioned on Wednesday afternoon that it was nonetheless a bit early to get a whole image of all of it. There have been some gross sales reported on the finish of Day 1, although it must be famous a number of of those had been probably pre-sold to shoppers and that galleries hardly ever disclose if these patrons come from Korea, Asia, or Europe and the US.
Vendor Thaddaeus Ropac, who has operated an area in Seoul since 2021, mentioned he does to not pre-sell works. “It’s nonetheless early within the truthful and it’s too early to come to any conclusions,” Ropac mentioned in a press release distributed to press. “Thus far it’s considerably slower on opening day by way of gross sales in comparison with final yr, however we’re not in any manner frightened about how issues will go by the finish of the truthful. There may be such an amazing dynamic in Seoul’s artwork scene and Frieze has actually constructed its presence and attain right here.”
Ropac’s gambit appeared to repay: his gallery reported having bought a Georg Baselitz portray for €1 million, or about $1.11 million.
There may be, at the least, some nice artwork on view right here. Beneath, a take a look at the most effective cubicles on the 2024 version of Frieze Seoul, which runs via September 7 on the COEX Conference and Exhibition Heart.
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Paul Pfeiffer at Paula Cooper Gallery
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Among the many most eye-catching works on view at Frieze Seoul is Paul Pfeiffer’s new piece Incarnator (Pampanga). The work, which takes up its personal wall, contains a wood sculpture of Justin Bieber, cut up into 5 components: head, torso, legs, proper arm, left arm. Pfeiffer was lately the topic of a mid-career survey on the Museum of Modern Artwork in Los Angeles, the place he confirmed an earlier model of this Bieber sculpture; once in a while, the artist updates this work to mirror how Bieber appears on the time of the work’s manufacturing. For this ongoing sequence, Pfeiffer has collaborated with encarnadores within the Philippines, who’re revered for his or her carved wood sculptures of Jesus, Mary, and Catholic saints. The sequence stems from the artist’s fascination with pop-cultural representations of masculinity and the way they lead us to idolize—worship, even—figures like Bieber.
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Tuan Andrew Nguyen at Galerie Quynh Modern Artwork
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s hour-long movie The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) follows Nguyệt, who runs a junkyard along with her mom within the North Central Coast of Vietnam. She makes sculptures from the bomb scraps that also litter that a part of the nation, and whereas she doesn’t initially consider in reincarnation, we study on the movie’s finish that Nguyệt was the modernist sculptor Alexander Calder in a previous life. At Frieze Seoul, Nguyen has continued exploring themes broached in that movie with a large, new, Calder-like sculpture from the very bomb steel featured in his film. Titled Damaged Solar (2024), this piece, like the opposite three others on view, has been specifically tuned by the artist and a monk to offer sonic waves meant to heal all who encounter it.
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Lee Jinjin and Park Youngsook at Arario Gallery
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The stellar works featured on this sales space provide visions of womanhood. Lee Jinjin presents six canvases, Seen 30–35, that present a lady’s face and arms (usually three of them as a substitute of two) floating on a deep black background. Obscuring her face is a sheet of white paper, burnt in various spots in every picture, that reveals totally different components of her face. The black paint used can also be vital. Often known as Leejeongbae black, it’s a pigment made by Lee’s husband, an artist himself and the pigment’s namesake. On an exterior wall of the sales space are two provocative pictures by Park Youngsook, who options within the MMCA’s “Connecting Our bodies: Asian Girls Artists” exhibition which opens in Seoul this week, exhibiting the artist’s nude physique (in black and white) along with her face changed (in colour) with half an apple in a single and the bottom of an iron within the different.
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Pacita Abad and Minouk Lim at Tina Kim Gallery
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews A textile portray by Pacita Abad and a sculpture by Minouk Lim pair properly in Tina Kim’s sales space. Titled To Paint with a Twist (1991), the Abad work options collaged materials onto which she has added her personal summary marks. Lim’s sculpture, Enwinded Rating (2022), is imbued with current Korean historical past and continues a sequence she started for her participation within the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. She befriended a cane maker, Eui Jin Chai, who collected felled tree branches that had an attention-grabbing look to them to create his utilitarian objects, which he would then carve. On the time of his demise, Chai left greater than 1,000 of these objects unfinished; they had been willed to Lim. Chai survived a bloodbath in 1949 that killed his older brother and youthful cousin, and Lim has related this sequence to the Gwangju Bloodbath of 1980. There’s nearly a talismanic high quality to her cane, which right here acts as a method to mark two atrocities that occurred in Korea.
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Kingsley Gunatillake at Blueprint 12
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews New Delhi–primarily based gallery Blueprint 12 has turned its sales space, within the truthful’s Focus Asia part, over to Sri Lankan artist Kingsley Gunatillake, whose work in portray and sculpture (each on view right here) focuses on the lengthy and horrible historical past of Sri Lanka’s civil battle, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. As a witness to those atrocities, Gunatillake metabolizes the aftermath of all this battle and destruction. His sculptures resembling charred books, into which he has set toy troopers, commemorate the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981.
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Hwang Sueyon at G Gallery
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Additionally within the Focus Asia part, Hwang Sueyon’s works on view concentrate on the fragility of the supplies of her sculptures, lots of that are deceptively sturdy in look. A looming work appears to be manufactured from stable bronze; it’s, in truth, crafted from black-painted paper and is hole inside, that means that it may tumble and collapse at any second. In entrance of this work is a sequence of labor-intensive items made out of sand. To make the works, the artist packs the sand, then provides layers of glue and lets them dry, a course of that takes a number of months. All however one of many works is handled with clay to forestall them from collapsing. However lots of them are partially submerged in water, with the untreated one left absolutely submerged. These, too, may seemingly disintegrate, although slowly and over time.
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Lee Kang-So at Thaddaeus Ropac
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Lee Kang-So, who lately joined Thaddaeus Ropac’s roster, is exhibiting a sparse abstraction with few marks and an interesting sculpture, titled Changing into-10-C-145 (2010), that seems to be a clay model of a rebar column that has collapsed onto itself. Each works converse to Lee’s idea of “failures,” which he believes to be important to creating nice artwork. “It’s while you’ve tousled the appropriate manner that good works are produced,” Lee lately advised Marie Claire Korea. “In the event you’re fascinated about the association and the general composition from all kinds of conventional views, you’re already beginning out unsuitable. This has been my perception since fairly a very long time in the past.”
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Niki de Saint Phalle at Galerie Mitterrand
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Within the Frieze Masters part, Paris-based Galerie Mitterrand is exhibiting a number of works by Niki de Saint Phalle. Probably the most eye-catching of them is a late-career work, Ganesh II (1992), that strikes. Set towards a vivid, brushy pink background, the half-painting, half-sculpture work exhibits the namesake Indian deity as filtered via de Saint Phalle’s palette. The mechanisms behind the portray—partially influenced by Jean Tingeuly, her second husband, who was himself identified for making mechanized sculptures—are activated by movement detector, inflicting the finished sculpture to interrupt aside after which slowly come again collectively.
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Morag Keil at Mission Native Informant
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews London-based Scottish artist Morag Keil is exhibiting The Value of Freedom (2024), a five-part sculpture during which a white bunny seems to emerge from a magician’s hat, finishing a mid-air arc earlier than descending again to the place it got here from. Mission Native Informant founder Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja related the work to our present post-financial disaster second, during which one could discover a want to leap out of 1’s present confines in a want for freedom. However maybe freedom isn’t all it’s cracked as much as be. There’s a stress on this work: the sensation of liberation won’t match the expertise of it. Possibly it’s all simply an infinite loop, or perhaps it’s only a becoming metaphor for in the present day’s limitless cycle of artwork festivals.