In the first week of September, Asia’s autumn art season opened with its first major event: Frieze Seoul. Now in its fourth edition, the fair brought together more than 120 galleries from over 30 countries and territories, making it the largest in its history. As before, the fair was divided into three sections: “Main,” “Focus Asia,” and “Frieze Masters.” Although the fair ran from September 3 to 6, many collectors, art professionals, and enthusiasts had arrived in Seoul early to “run the exhibitions” and experience gallery nights that stretched into the early hours.
Frieze Seoul, 2025. Lee Bul, *From 1998 to Now*, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025. Photograph by Jeon Byung-cheol. Image courtesy of the Samsung Museum of Art. Running alongside the fair, Frieze Art Week encompassed a series of authoritative, scholarly institutional exhibitions, including a major retrospective of one of Korea’s most influential contemporary artists, Lee Bul, at the Samsung Museum of Art, and the first institutional presentation in Asia by the prominent American artist Mark Bradford at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
Argentine artist Adrián Villar-Rojas transformed the Sangsangmadang Art Center into a war-damaged base; Louise Bourgeois’s “Spider” at the Hoam Museum; Antony Gormley’s meditative exhibition at Museum SAN, designed by Tadao Ando; a show by modern-art master Kim Tschang-Yeul at MMCA; and Kimsooja’s large-scale installation in a traditional hanok were among the week’s other highlights. Before the fair opened, we spoke with its director, Patrick Lee, about the program and Seoul’s citywide “ecosystem.”
Frieze Seoul, 2025. Frieze Seoul once again took place at COEX, with the concurrent KIAF Seoul art fair downstairs. On opening day, South Korea’s minister of culture visited the fair, and we saw Kim Taehyung of BTS lingering before a work by Anicka Yi. In the Main section, the major blue-chip galleries brought substantial works by their artists, and the sales offered fresh confidence in the market for the second half of the year.
The pace of sales was clearly brisk, led by Asian collectors. Large Korean museums, foundations, and private collectors moved decisively on the first day, joined by a substantial number of collectors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. A relatively small number of sales came from the United States and Europe. The strongest demand remained concentrated on established artists and those already validated by the market: recently deceased or living older artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Georg Baselitz, Alex Katz, and Martha Jungwirth, as well as enduring market favorites including George Condo, Tracey Emin, and Antony Gormley.
Hauser & Wirth booth, Frieze Seoul, 2025. Photograph by Creative Resources. Hauser & Wirth recorded more than $8 million in sales on the first day alone. Among the most expensive works sold was a new triptych by Mark Bradford, *Okay, then I apologize*, acquired by an Asian private collector for $4.5 million. George Condo’s 2025 acrylic on paper, *Purple Sunshine*, sold for $1.2 million.
A work on paper and a bronze sculpture by Louise Bourgeois entered Asian private collections for $950,000 and $600,000, respectively. Rashid Johnson’s sculpture *Broken Soul “So Far Ahead”* sold for $750,000, while Avery Singer’s 2025 work *Poker Players (Study)* went to an Asian institution for $475,000.
Lee Bul’s *Untitled Sculpture, W6-1* and *Untitled (Cyborg—Velvet #23)* were acquired by an Asian foundation for $400,000 and $300,000, respectively. White Cube booth, Frieze Seoul, 2025. By the end of the second day, White Cube had sold five high-value works. Georg Baselitz’s 2014 work *Erstens, bitte schön* was purchased by a collector from Hong Kong for as much as €1.3 million, making it one of the fair’s earliest sales above €1 million.
Other major transactions included Antony Gormley sculptures from 2024 and 2016, sold for £250,000 and £450,000, respectively, and a bronze sculpture by Tracey Emin, which sold for £220,000. Thaddaeus Ropac booth, Frieze Seoul, 2025. Among the gallery’s high-value sales was a Georg Baselitz work priced at €1.8 million; Alex Katz’s 2025 new work *Lilies 8* was priced at $900,000; and Martha Jungwirth’s 2022 abstract work *Ohne Titel* was priced at €340,000.
David Zwirner booth, Frieze Seoul, 2025. David Zwirner sold new works by Huma Bhabha, Oscar Murillo, and Walter Price, along with important works by Michaël Borremans, Marlene Dumas, and Wolfgang Tillmans. A painting by Lucas Arruda was acquired by a prominent Seoul museum. The director of Perrotin told us that by the end of the second day, most of the works on the booth had sold; the highest-priced was a signature wood-panel painting by Takashi Murakami, which sold for $600,000.
Frieze Seoul, 2025. At the fair, we also found that the “Focus Asia” section had been given an especially prominent position. It concentrated on relatively young Asian galleries founded after 2013. Among them were galleries from Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, and Yogyakarta.
“Galleries can take bold, experimental approaches to presenting solo exhibitions by artists on their booths,” Lee told us. Fu Liang, *Sink in Deia*, 2025. Fu Liang, *Six Pointed Stars*, 2025. This year, ten galleries occupied the central exhibition area. One of the most striking was Linseed Gallery from Shanghai, which presented *The Body of Solaris*, a solo exhibition by the young artist Fu Liang, born in 1993. His works contain oceans and nebulae, with the human body appearing and disappearing in their shadowy hues.
“It’s like a science-fiction elegy moving across paint, sculpture, and abstract form,” Lee said. drawingroom booth, Frieze Seoul, 2025. The Indonesia-based kohesi Initiatives presented Tomteus Anggawan Kusno’s fictional archive exploring colonial memory. drawingroom, from Seoul, showed black-and-white works by Im Sungoo, an artist Lee himself greatly admires.
Yokote Taiki, *Floating Rubble / Zen, Gure, Coco, Sen, Po, Ten, Kuki, Kurumi (The Cat Is Away, Everything Is in Disorder)*, 2025. The Tokyo-based artist Yokote Taiki, born in 1998, dismantled his former studio and used a magnetic levitation device to “move” the remaining chunks of reinforced concrete into the fair.
The work responds to the memory of a space while giving these “discarded materials” a new pulse in midair. Im Youngzoo, *Calming Signal*, 2023/2025. Im Youngzoo, a Korean woman artist born in 1982 and this year’s recipient of the Frieze Artist Award, presented a compelling new installation. Her work *Calming Signal* (2023/25) responds to the fair’s theme, “Future Commons,” exploring similarity and community.
Set within a gridded structure, the three-channel video installation draws on the calming signals dogs use—turning their heads, licking their noses and lips, lying down, and making other instinctive gestures to reassure one another—to suggest similar behaviors among human individuals and groups under collective pressure. Matsa Gallery booth, Frieze Masters, Seoul, 2025. “Frieze Masters presents historical treasures,” Lee told us. The 20 booths participating in this year’s Masters section placed representative works by major Asian artists alongside important Western creations.
Among them was a solo presentation by Ulay, a pioneer of Polaroid photography, body art, and performance, at Matsa Gallery in Beijing. Asia Art Center brought works on paper, ink, and sculpture by Zhu Wei Bai, Yang Yingfeng, and Ju Ming, three artists of major importance in Taiwan’s postwar art history. Frieze Seoul, 2025. Bernard Bouche devoted its entire booth to the French artist Émilie Charmy.
As a woman working within an otherwise exclusively male circle of modernist painters, Charmy was long overlooked by art history. Her vivid, buoyant colors often capture women in moments of contemplation or repose, offering an intimate and distinctive female perspective. Exterior of Frieze House Seoul, 2025. Interior of Frieze House Seoul, 2025. “Of course, beyond the fair itself, Frieze Art Week presented a citywide celebration of art, culture, and community.”
“This year, we are also opening a new year-round gallery space, Frieze House Seoul,” Lee told us. The Frieze House Seoul she described extends the tradition of Frieze’s “old home,” No. 9 Cork Street in London. The “new home” sits on an ordinary street in Seoul’s Yaksu-dong neighborhood, amid the straight lines of office and apartment buildings, with a softly curved façade, rounded tiles, and bonsai-like trees punctuating the site.
The inaugural exhibition, *UnHouse*, reimagines the home—the most intimate of spaces—through a queer framework and presents works by more than 15 artists. Lee Bul, *From 1998 to Now*, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025. Photograph by Jeon Byung-cheol. Image courtesy of the Samsung Museum of Art. One of the chief reasons audiences come to Seoul during Frieze is undoubtedly the exceptionally strong institutional exhibitions presented as part of Frieze Art Week.
“I would especially recommend Lee Bul at the Samsung Museum of Art, Mark Bradford at the Amorepacific Museum of Art, and Adrián Villar-Rojas at the Sangsangmadang Art Center,” Lee, the fair’s director, told us. Lee Bul, *From 1998 to Now*, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025. Photograph by Jeon Byung-cheol. Image courtesy of the Samsung Museum of Art. The Samsung Museum of Art exhibition traces Lee Bul’s major creative developments from the late 1990s to the present, bringing together approximately 150 works, many of them enormous installations.
The exhibition includes her early *Cyborg* and *Anagram* series, as well as her karaoke installations—works that first appeared in major international museum exhibitions and biennials in the late 1990s, marking Lee Bul’s arrival on the international stage. Although radically different in form, the works share a continuing line of inquiry: the body under technologically mediated, posthuman conditions, and humanity’s persistent pursuit of immortality and perfection.
The exhibition will travel to M+ in Hong Kong in 2026. Mark Bradford, *Keep Walking*, Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea, 2025. © Mark Bradford. Photograph by Kyoungtae Kim. The exhibition by the renowned American artist Mark Bradford at the Amorepacific Museum of Art makes full use of the museum’s expansive, hushed spaces. It includes approximately 40 works across painting, sculpture, installation, video, and other media.
In making the works, Bradford uses posters, newspapers, and other materials collected near his Los Angeles studio. In monumental paintings, he transforms fragments of the city into “palimpsests,” casting a sharp light on the sociopolitical challenges facing marginalized communities. Adrián Villar-Rojas, *The Language of the Enemy*, Sangsangmadang Art Center, 2025. At the Sangsangmadang Art Center, everything has been “completely transformed.” For his first solo exhibition in Korea, Adrián Villar-Rojas conducted a sculptural experiment in time and space, converting the entire building into a sculptural ecosystem.
For Villar-Rojas, the museum is no longer a place of preservation but a site of decomposition, mutation, and inheritance, governed by nonhuman, posthuman, and synthetic subjects. The exhibition space becomes a wild, indifferent landscape: unstable and unmoved by its viewers. Works from this series also appeared last year in the Beyeler Foundation’s annual exhibition in May. Kim Tschang-Yeul solo exhibition, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2025. Elsewhere, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presented the 13th Mediacity Biennale, curated by the e-flux team, while the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) showed the Korean Artist Award and a major retrospective of the modern-art master Kim Tschang-Yeul.
Louise Bourgeois, *Maman* (1999), Ho-Am Museum, 2021. Photograph © The Easton Foundation. Antony Gormley, *Earth*, Museum SAN, 2025. Outside Seoul, the Ho-Am Museum presented Louise Bourgeois’s “Spider,” which merged with the surrounding lake and mountains.
At Museum SAN, designed by Tadao Ando, Antony Gormley’s exhibition was also not to be missed. Beneath a dome spanning 25 meters, Gormley’s human-form sculptures stood or lay in silence. Kimsooja, *To Breathe—Sunhyewon*, 2025. Kimsooja’s *To Breathe—Sunhyewon* in a hanok uses mirrored surfaces to extend the space indefinitely. Works made especially for the exhibition also incorporate one of her signature elements: the *bottari*, a traditional Korean cloth bundle.
These bundles of clothing, donated by local residents, vividly express ideas of movement, travel, arrival, and departure, giving physical form to the memories and emotions people carry with them. James Turrell, *Returning*, Pace Gallery Seoul, 2025. Image courtesy of Pace Gallery. Beyond the major institutional exhibitions, Gallery Nights, which ran from September 1 through the evening of September 4, brought art into contact with daily life and music. After spending the day at Frieze, it offered audiences an ideal place to continue.
“Euljiro Night has a raw energy that has not been gentrified, with many nonprofit spaces and excellent bars. Highlights include N/A, Doosan Gallery, and a special exhibition at Haegue Yang’s studio. Hannam Night centers on Lee Bul’s exhibition at the Samsung Museum of Art, with a remarkable concentration of top galleries within walking distance: Lehmann Maupin, Teresita Fernández, Schöbel Gallery, Ropac, Gallery Baton, Meyerrieger, P21, Whistle, and Pace.”
Lee also shared that Pace Gallery was showing outstanding works by James Turrell, known for his light installations. Ugo Rondinone, *brightening your day*, Gladstone Gallery Seoul, 2025. Izumi Kato solo exhibition, Perrotin Seoul, 2025. Photograph by Hwang Jung Wook. © 2025 Izumi Kato. Images courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Cheongdam Night included spaces such as SongEun Art Center, Perrotin, White Cube, Gladstone, and G Gallery.
Samcheong Night focused on the strength of Korea’s local art scene and was particularly suited to wandering. It brought together established Korean galleries such as Kukje, Gallery Hyundai, and PKM, alongside Barakat Contemporary and Baik Gallery, as well as institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Sangsangmadang Art Center, and the Seoul Museum of Craft Art.
“Ilmin Museum of Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the 13th Mediacity Biennale also extended their hours during this period,” Lee told us. Ann Veronica Janssens, *September in Seoul*, Schöbel Gallery, Seoul, 2025. Photograph © Andrea Rossetti. In recent years, Korean artists, curators, and scholars have increasingly “risen” and “been seen” within the international art world.
The reason behind this phenomenon lies in its network of institutional support—galleries, museums, curators, collectors, and critics working together to amplify these voices. As an anchor of Seoul’s artistic and cultural life, Frieze Seoul brings together art, design, food, music, film, and fashion. Its presence continues to grow.