Best Booths at Frieze Seoul 2025

SAC Gallery made a daring curatorial assertion by dedicating its whole sales space to Thai artist and filmmaker Prapat Jiwarangsan. The presentation, titled “The Portrait of Asian Household,” marks the gallery’s development from showcasing rising expertise to a dedicated investments in established artists. On view are three video works that discover the advanced dynamics of latest Asian id by way of examinations household constructions, cultural expectations, and generational shifts. Jiwarangsan’s cinematic background is clear in his method to narrative-driven items like Parasite Household (2021–23), the place he traces the evolution of household roles throughout completely different cultural contexts.

The Frieze Seoul debut of hometown outfit Solar Gallery was a speaking level in Korean gallery circles on opening day, largely as a result of its proprietor, Lee Sunghoon, is the present president of the Galleries Affiliation of Korea, which organizes the concurrent KIAF honest downstairs. The gallery’s Frieze Masters presentation of Chungji Lee’s “MURUE” collection, from the Nineteen Nineties, brings new consideration to Korea’s solely feminine Dansaekhwa painter, who has contributions have lengthy been overshadowed regardless of having work within the everlasting collections of the nation’s high museum. The “MURUE” works—a portmanteau of the French phrases mur (wall) and rue (avenue)—function Lee’s signature strategy of protecting canvas with rollers, then scraping them with knives to create textured, monochromatic surfaces.

Probably the most eye-catching set up at Arario Gallery’s 13-artist sales space resembles a kaiju film set, full with oversize creatures and cinematic particles. This theatrical surroundings is the work of Don Sunpil, who has remodeled anime figurine tradition into immersive sculpture that challenges the boundaries of excessive and low artwork. Don’s set up options hybrid objects and intentionally imperfect reproductions drawn from tokusatsu particular results and bishōjo collectible figurines, creating sculptures that discover the stress between mass manufacturing and particular person craftsmanship.

Within the Focus Asia part, which showcases rising galleries from throughout the area, Tokyo’s CON_ delivers a presentation that actually stops guests of their tracks—not simply catching their eyes however catching their ft. Taiki Yokote’s Floating Rubble (when the cat’s away, the mice will play), from 2022–25, options concrete fragments from the artist’s demolished studio spinning mid-air by magnetic power, whereas trash baggage spill past the sales space’s boundaries into the honest’s walkways. The 26-year-old sculptor represents a rising technology of Japanese artists who got here of age through the shift from mass media to digital saturation, channeling this uncanny on a regular basis expertise into kinetic installations that defy each gravity and conference. Yokote’s salvaged constructing supplies—resin-cast rubble, twisted metal wires, floating particles—every obtain pet names like Po and Ten, reflecting his affectionate relationship with discarded matter.

Among the many works at Tokyo-based gallery A Lighthouse Known as Kanata’s sales space, Hisao Domoto’s Untitled (1966) stands out for its thickly utilized bands of black paint that sit atop a layer of putting pink paint. That work distinction sharply with Satoru Ozaki’s am i able to see you (2024), a round stainless-steel sculpture that resembles the opening of void. On the honest’s opening day, the work, by an artist whom the gallery considers “one of many forgotten and misplaced treasures of Japan,” was acquired by the Museum of Advantageous Arts, Houston.

It’s arduous to stroll previous Istanbul gallery Dirimart’s sales space with out being a bit confused. The sales space seems to include nothing—or reasonably, floating in mid-air are replicas scaled to half the sales space’s measurement and half of that half-size. That is Ayşe Erkmen’s Half of (2025), a site-specific set up that creates a sales space inside sales space inside sales space impact. “We took a danger,” gallery supervisor Dilara Altuğ advised ARTnews, noting that the gallery is banking on guests’ curiosity to find the layered spatial intervention suspended inside their 527-square-foot house. The fragile maquettes fabricated from Japanese shoji paper and picket constructions construct on Erkmen’s decades-long observe of repositioning current constructions, reasonably than creating new objects.

The collaboration between Beijing’s Antenna Area and Los Angeles’s Commonwealth & Council highlights how galleries can use resource-sharing methods in face of a difficult market. The works on view, from every gallery’s roster, mix seamlessly collectively: Lotus L. Kang’s 2024–25 Molt (Woodridge–Basel–Seoul), with its draped sheets of tanned picture paper suspended like reworking our bodies, pairs with Shuang Li’s Our Girl of Sorrows (2024), a modern assemblage fabricated from resin, material, print on vinyl, discovered objects.

Within the Masters part, Hakgojae Gallery’s presentation facilities across the theme of the Korean Mom, anchoring 9 pioneering Korean artists round an 18th-century Moon Jar. Right here, faces emerge because the unifying motif—from Park Soo Keun’s stoic postwar girls to Pen Varlen’s Mom (1985), painted the 12 months he turned the age at which his mom had died. Varlen’s thick impasto layers seize profound longing, whereas the Moon Jar’s mild asymmetry—fashioned by becoming a member of two hemispheres—offers each aesthetic anchor and philosophical framework.

Within the early days of Frieze Seoul, it appeared like establishments had been being dragged alongside by the honest. Now that dynamic has flipped, famous a curator colleague encountered on the honest, and nowhere is that this reversal extra evident than at Hauser & Wirth’s sales space. Mark Bradford’s monumental triptych Okay, then I apologize (2025), which offered on on the primary day for $4.5 million to an Asian collector, serves as each a industrial centerpiece and strategic complement to the artist’s concurrent solo exhibition on the Amorepacific Museum of Artwork. This synchronicity between honest and institutional programming displays the evolving relationship between galleries and cultural establishments. Two different gallery artists—Louise Bourgeois at Hoam Museum and Lee Bul at Leeum Museum—even have exhibitions on view this week; Hauser & Wirth’s $8 million first-day gross sales complete appears to replicate not mere industrial success however built-in programming.

At Frieze Seoul, Tempo demonstrates why mega-galleries stay mega: they preview the long run whereas historicizing the current. Varied strains of abstraction are on view, representing a world continuum, with highlights together with Adolph Gottlieb’s monumental Increasing (1962), on the sales space’s middle, and Yoo Youngkuk’s Water (1979), which is being proven publicly for the primary time. These masters’ works are paired with artists generations youthful, like Friedrich Kunath and Lauren Quin, each of whom just lately signed to the gallery. However with its deal with the historic, Tempo’s sales space is a reminder that in unsure occasions institutional gravitas nonetheless sells.