Special thanks to the team at KAMS including: Jiyoung Yun, Dain Jung, Juhee Kang, Hansol Jeong
Korean Artists Today (KAT) is an initiative launched in 2023 by the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) to promote upcoming Korean artists and further their presence on the global stage.
Working in painting, filmmaking, performance, installation and other media, I believe that the eight emerging and mid-career artists selected for Korean Artists Today 2025 truly reflect the diversity, originality and innovation found in the Korean art scene, at home and internationally.
This year, it has been a personal honor to serve on the selection jury alongside esteemed international art professionals, and on behalf of Frieze to be entrusted with this publication celebrating the project.
We decided to structure the publication like a Gilgeori toast. The first layer sets the scene, with a “Who’s Who” of the Korean art world and a reflection on trends in current art practice by Seoulbased curator Yoon Yuli. The rich filling at the center is comprised of interviews and profiles with all eight of the selected Korean Artists Today—Jewyo Rhii, Minae Kim, Min ha Park, ikkibawiKrrr, Choi Goen, Sun Woo, CHE Onejoon and Byungjun Kwon—written by Sean Burns, Cassie Packard and Chloe Stead of frieze magazine. The last layer looks forward to ongoing developments and upcoming events in Korean art globally, including Sook-Kyung Lee’s plans for the Whitworth in Manchester, UK, and a preview of Ayoung Kim’s exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, US.
Also included is a preview of a group show of Korean Artists Today at SONGEUN during Frieze Seoul, and a special collaborative presentation by KAT-selected artists Byungjun Kwon and Min ha Park taking place at Frieze London this year. If you’re reading this at either fair, be sure to check these out. The Korean Artists Today don’t just represent the current moment: they point the way forward too.
Matthew McLean
Setting the Scene A
A Who’s Who of Korean Art
INSTITUTIONS
Kim Sung-hee
Former university professor and co-founder of CAN Foundation and director of MMCA, with ambitious plans for the fourvenue institution
Park Yang-woo
Cultural policy expert who in 2021 resumed his role as president of Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Kyung An
Doryun Chong
Curator leading programming at Hong Kong’s M+
Acclaimed curator for the Asian Art Initiative at the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, where she also helps expand the museum’s Asian collection
ARTISTS
Haegue Yang
Influential Berlin-based multimedia artist who took her Venetian blinds to Venice back in 2009 when she represented Korea at the Venice Biennale
Heecheon Kim
Clara Kim
California-born curator and member of the CIMAM Board, now shaping the curatorial vision of LA MoCA
Kang Seung-wan
Renowned art historian at the helm of Busan Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Soyeon Ahn
Artistic director o ering a platform to Korean artists—and some international guests—at Atelier Hermès in Seoul
Sunjung Kim
Influential artistic director at Art Sonje Center since 2002, and curator of this year’s Frieze Live performance series at Frieze Seoul
Hyun Woo Shin
Chair of the Hanwha Foundation of Culture, instrumental in plans for the Centre Pompidou, Seoul
Lee Bae
Soon to turn 70, whose work with charcoal shows a mastery of abstract color and surface
An important figure representing a generation of artists whose work is shaped by an awareness of life in the grip of digital technology
Lee Bul
Category-defying artist, with a key presence on the international stage since the 1990s, and a major exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art this year
Ayoung Kim
Winner of this year’s LG Guggenheim award, acknowledging her work at the intersection of art and technology, with a solo show at MoMA PS1 this fall
Do
Ho Suh
Christine Sun Kim
California-born, Berlin-based artist who explores sound from a deaf perspective
Jane Jin Kaisen
Feminist artist and filmmaker, based in Copenhagen where she is a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Itinerant artist whose signature delicate fabric renderings of architectural spaces wow audiences the world over
Moka Lee
Rising Seoul-based painter winning admiration from the likes of Luc Tuymans for her haunting images
A Who’s Who of Korean Art
COLLECTORS & INFLUENCERS
Woon Kyung Lee
Seoul-based patron and collector of Korean and international art, who sits on the Frieze Seoul Host Committee
RM
Art-loving K-pop star, who inspires a generation of “Namjooning” fans to engage with museums
Miyoung Lee
New York-based vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art, an active patron with a growing collection of works by Korean and international artists
Irene Kim
An art fair veteran, now head of US Arts and Culture at CHANEL
COMMERCIAL SECTOR
Soo Choi
Trailblazing young Seoul gallerist who founded P21 gallery in 2017
@oottoogi
Soyoung Lee
Young collector sharing her knowledge to educate the next generation of collectors
Anonymous social media influencer shares regular updates on what they love in contemporary art to a devoted following
Teo Yang
Designer working with traditional forms with a decisive, MZ taste in contemporary art and objects
Kang Soo-hyeong
Korean-Thai collector and patron serving on the Tate Modern and New Museum boards and leading a kunsthalle and sculpture park in Thailand via her Khao Yai Art foundation
Jaeyong Cho
With his partner Hyunji Kim, founder of the “Joy and Happiness Collection” that draws an international audience to Daegu
Taehee Joung
Patrick Lee
Dynamic director of Frieze Seoul
High-flying young auctioneer, heading up art sales at Seoul Auction
Sunghoon Lee
New chair of Galleries Association of Korea, the body behind Kiaf, Seoul’s first art fair
Seokho Brian Jeong
Leading the lively Art Busan fair founded by his mother, Younghee Sohn
Hyun-Sook Lee
Founder of the legendary Kukje Gallery, whose daughter founded Tina Kim Gallery in New York
Kyungmin Lee
Founder of the edgy and highly respected Itaewon-based Whistle
A VIEW FROM SEOUL: WHY PAINTING IS POWERFUL AGAIN
THE PARADOX OF PAINTING
Seoul in 2025 presents an intriguing cultural paradox. Amid a visually complex and information-rich urban environment, painting is experiencing a new lease of life. This phenomenon has emerged as a deliberate cultural counter-current: a conscious embrace of deceleration in a world fixated on speed. Galleries, museums and independent art spaces throughout Seoul overflow with vibrant canvases from emerging artists, which attract both the general public and collectors. Once again, visitors to galleries can gaze upon a venerable artistic form: the painting.
Reducing this resurgence merely to nostalgia or a trend misses its deeper cultural significance. To my mind, it emerges from a longing born of an era dominated by the intense speed of digital imagery a desire for tangible materiality and the depth of human craft. Contemporary painting in Seoul does not merely preserve past artistic glories; it thoughtfully absorbs, analyzes and critically reassembles contemporary conditions, reflecting through precise artistic responses the challenges and complexities of modern life. This trend is particularly noteworthy because, with the exception of a few dansaekhwa masters who were rediscovered internationally after the 2000s, Seoul has largely been considered barren ground for painting. This seems to me, intrinsically linked to the question of what painting, as an artistic medium, is capable of projecting in the current era.
VANISHING AND SEDIMENT
What distinguishes the younger generation of Seoul artists who have passionately turned to painting is not simply their perceived reaction to digital culture, but their intentional use of time, medium and technique. If digital images flow incessantly like streaming liquid, paintings contain meticulous layers of sediment. Each canvas accumulates marks, gestures and decisions, vividly tracing the passage of time. Brushstrokes beneath the surface, earlier overpainted forms and chance drips of pigment combine in a tangible archaeological
Yooyun
Yang, Taking , 2024.
Courtesy: the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery
record that testifies to the work’s evolution. Just as geologists discern the earth’s layered history through rock strata, these paintings convey an intuitive journey of accumulated moments and deliberate artistic decisions.
The work of artists such as Seeun Kim and Heemin Chung, for instance, exemplifies how keenly painting can register an artist’s surroundings. From the macroenvironment of the city’s outer skin to the micro-level of the interface, they pull the diverse senses of the era into the painting itself. In the work of a still-younger generation, such as Hyunjin Kim and Noh-wan Park, we glimpse the dynamic phases of choice that painting confronts at every moment. Their canvases are, in e ect, an image that contends with image. Meanwhile, Yooyun Yang and Nosik Lim are both artists who have successfully assimilated and created their own contemporary take on the “bizarre” pictorial category of “oriental” painting.
Choosing to appreciate contemporary painting today involves consciously embracing irregularity, complexity and depth, and opposing the instant gratification and effortless evaporation of digital culture. The sustained contemplation of a painting provokes the viewer not merely to consider what is depicted, but to ask, “How did this visual and physical entity come into existence?” Such inquiry captures a fundamental power in painting: the capacity to introduce meaningful friction into an otherwise largely frictionless torrent of digital information. A painting contains layers of human gesture accumulated over periods of contemplation and physical application. The medium uniquely foregrounds the build-up of traces and decisions, transforming fleeting visual impulses into enduring presences. Painting’s friction comes explicitly from the interplay between mental processes and physical mark-making; it transcends mere representation, filtering and reconstructing fragmented experiences through the artist. On this tangible stage, velocity is converted into density, data manifests as texture and ephemeral scrolling becomes enduring brushstrokes.
Of course, these points are universal and not specific to Seoul. Painting is forever being declared dead and then springing back to life: it never goes away. However, painting appears to have gained a particular urgency and significance in contemporary Seoul, where it is
amplified by the city’s rapid pace of transformation and disappearance. This is a city that continually rebuilds itself faster than it can remember. Yet on the canvas, erased things refuse to disappear. The artistic sediment accumulated by Seoul’s young painters poignantly mirrors the environments they inhabit: intimate experiences lived amid relentless urban change. Like their canvases, the city itself is complex and multifaceted, marked by explosive growth and layered historical traces. Its landscape is a hybrid architecture where traditional alleyways coexist with hypermodern skyscrapers. This metropolitan complexity also includes poignant memories of redevelopment, disruptive transformations under the pressure of modernization, recent martial law and digital phantoms drifting through the city a city grappling intensely with its own uncertain future. In this context, painting emerges as one of the few e ective mediums able to articulate the city’s contradictions, confusion and obsessive pursuit of beauty.
FUMBLING REALISM
OLED screens may transmit light at nearly the speed of memory, but within a painting, light must crawl slowly through physical layers of oil and resin. This slowness creates an optical speed bump. What specifically unfolds across the surfaces of these contemporary canvases? Rather than conventional landscapes or classical portraiture, these works could better be termed “contemporary scenes.” Portraits shift between character and figuration; still lifes blur distinctions between commodities and objects, vividly reflecting a generation’s shared anxieties. These contemporary works deliberately diverge from traditional realism, which focused solely on precise representation. The genealogy of this shift can be traced to the 1980s. As painterly expressionism surged globally, an exploration of figuration (hyeong-sang) surfaced in Korea. It was a significant attempt to seek out the uniqueness of Korean painting in terms of a universal aesthetic, breaking from a previous tendency to position itself in relation to Western art or an institutionalized “Eastern” art. This current, however, did not cohere into a major group like
dansaekhwa or Minjung art, but remained a series of sporadic, individual practices. The current cultural climate in Seoul seems to be reviving this forgotten lineage, leading to a new demand for a “vernacular” painting. That Kyungwon Moon an artist of international renown for her media work returned to her origins in painting for her solo booth at Frieze New York this year in order to critically reexamine the medium is perhaps the most noteworthy case in point. This new generation choses to reflect contemporary modes of consciousness, capturing historical realities on the brink of disappearance. Amidoverwhelmingvisual spectacles and digital distractions, painting o ers one of the simplest yet most robust anchors for perception. A painting commands attention and invites contemplation; we recover senses numbed by relentless speed. Painting trains us to question the seamlessness of the feed. This quiet resistance confronts disappearance head-on, emphasizing friction over spectacle. The liquid speed of pixels cedes to the mineral density of pigment.
A NEW CONFIDENCE
The resurgence of painting in Seoul in 2025 signifies our era’s artistic maturity and cultural self-awareness. It embodies the newfound confidence of a generation prepared to engage honestly with contemporary complexities and crises, instead of seeking refuge in denial, nostalgia or idealized pasts. This phenomenon resonates with what the philosopher Grafton Tanner has termed “foreverism.” It is a concept I explored in my exhibition, “Foreverism: Endless Horizons” at Ilmin Museum of Art (2024), which examined the perpetual present dominating our era as a problem of meaningful duration and historical perception. And now, it seems, we are ready to address this tendency through painting. It constitutes a particularly compelling development in the city’s art scene. Beyond institutional acclaim or heightened market attention, contemporary painting in Seoul seeks out new and subtle forms of previously unexplored meaning that are uniquely suited to our rapidly evolving times.
Yoon Yuli is chief curator of Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea. He lives in Seoul, Korea.
Korean Artists Today B
Asked to summarize how KAT benefits the selected artists, LAURENCINA FARRANT explains, “Each year, the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) undertakes a journey: to handpick through a stringent jury process eight outstanding midcareer and emerging Korean contemporary artists, championing their work internationally and shining a light on the dynamism of Korea’s art scene. This initiative gives the artists opportunities and enhanced exposure but, more importantly, the confidence and experience to present their work on the global stage.”
Farrant is artistic director of SONGEUN Art & Cultural Foundation. She has supervised the expansion of SONGEUN, opening its iconic Herzog & de Meuron building in September 2021, the first project by the renowned Swiss architects in Korea. She is also founding director of Laurence Geo rey’s Ltd, a consultancy specializing in arts strategy, development and promotion. Over her 30-year career in Seoul, Farrant has collaborated with numerous leading artists, museum and private collections, and advised on sponsorship and brand exposure through innovative cultural projects.
DR. JE YUN MOON is a Seoulbased curator and writer who has held curatorial roles at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea; Liverpool Biennial, UK; and the Korean Cultural Centre, London, UK. She has co-curated solo exhibitions for artists including Lee Bul, Sora Kim, Koo Jeong A, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Heidi Bucher,
The Jury
Ho Tzu Nyen and Young In Hong. For Moon, serving on the KAT jury “has been an inspiring opportunity to engage with established artists like Jewyo Rhii and ikkibawiKrrr alongside emerging talents, and to reflect upon Seoul’s vibrant and diverse contemporary art scene.”
Moon completed her doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017. It examined the intersection of exhibitionmaking and dance, focusing on choreography as a conceptual tool in contemporary curatorial practices. In her work, she continues to explore the limits of the body and its relationship with language; recent projects include “Tongue of Rain” at Art Sonje Center (2024), and the performance program 신 경 ( 神經 )–“Nerve or Divine Pathway” at Frieze Seoul 2024.
SO-LA JUNGis director of the Curatorial Bureau at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and a member of the Public Art Committee of the Seoul Metropolitan Government. She has worked as an independent curator, researcher and lecturer at Chung-Ang University, Dongguk University, Sungshin Women’s University and other institutions.
Jung’s master’s dissertation at City, University of London, focused on the environmental responsibility of art museums, and, reflecting this interest, she currently leads the SeMA ecology project, through which she looks at sustainable museum policies. Since receiving her PhD from Ewha Womans University, Seoul with a thesis on Merleau-Ponty’s theory of art, she has examined phenomenological experience in virtual environments and has gone on to explore the production and experience of artworks on digital platforms.
Asked about her hopes for KAT this year, Jung expressed her wish that it “grows into a plat-
form that not only presents leading Korean artists to international audiences, but shares their ideas, and helps convey how contemporary Korean artists have thoughtfully blended Korea’s local context with a universal artistic language through their distinctive works.”
Asked to summarize this year’s list of KAT artists in five words, ELAINE W. NGresponded: “Ecology, species, ambiguity, community and disruption.” Ng is the editor and publisher of the magazine ArtAsiaPacific, established in 1993 and dedicated to contemporary art from Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. She is also assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts, where she has taught since 2017, in the areas of modern and contemporary Asian art history, feminist art history, art criticism and research methodology for the visual arts. Ng lectures and publishes widely, and over the last two decades has sat on the jury of numerous international art prizes. In 2023, she was the co-editor of Extreme Beauty: Twelve Contemporary Korean Artists. Since 2010, Ng has been on the board of directors of Asia Art Archive in the US, and currently sits on the academic advisory board of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and the advisory board of Alserkal Avenue in Dubai.
Having joined Frieze in 2012, MATTHEW MCLEAN is currently creative director, Frieze Studios and, since 2016, editor, Frieze Week. From 2016–17 he was cocurator of Frieze Talks with Lydia
Yee, and since 2022 has hosted the regular Frieze digital series Art:LIVE.
He holds master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His writing has appeared in numerous magazines, and he has contributed to numerous publications including Phaidon’s “Vitamin” series.
As creative director of Frieze Studios, McLean has helped direct artist-led projects, ranging from an interactive charitable plant sale by Laure Prouvost to an artist-designed phone case by Simon Fujiwara, as well as creative collaborations with commercial partners including American Express, Breguet, CHANEL, Prada and Sony Music Entertainment.
Asked what he has learned about the Korean art scene through serving on the KAT jury, McLean says, “I was struck right away by the extremely high quality and great variety among the artists’ practices. To see how artists balance ideas and esthetics rooted in specificity and universality—and, in some cases, interrogate precisely this balance or tension was fascinating. Most of all, I became conscious of how much more of the Korean scene is left for me to discover.”
The recommendations committee for KAT 2025 was Ben Eastham, editor in chief, e-flux Criticism; Hannah Kim, head of exhibitions, Thaddaeus Ropac, Seoul; Suzy Park, independent curator; Mark Rappolt, editor in chief, ArtReview; Billy Tang, former executive director and curator, Para Site, Hong Kong; Valentine Umansky, curator, international art, Tate Modern, London; Jiwon Yu, independent curator, Seoul; and Yoon Yuli, chief curator, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul.
Sara Harrison is an editor. She lives in London, UK.
Recitation of Itaewon Poetry (Eindhoven), 2013, installation view, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel.
Gegenwartskunst,
CASSIE PACKARD
You’ve characterized your typewriters as “storytelling machines,” and I was wondering what made you want to tell stories?
JEWYO RHII
I want all the objects and whatever images that I make or draw to be very closely connected to me. That was the first desire I had as an artist, actually. Less so now, but in the beginning a lot of my art education was related to technique, which didn’t really interest me. I wondered how I could relate to what I made, so that it mattered to me. It wasn’t about who saw it or thought about it, it was about me: about feeling the gap between my natural reaction to the things around me. I alter everyday products like kitchenware: things people use at home.
Love Letter, 2013. Courtesy: the artist and Amanda Wilkinson
Jewyo Rhii (b. 1971)
Interviewby Cassie Packard
→ When I see them, I have an urge to change them to meet my needs or my tastes. I break and rearrange them so they lose their function and become a kind of monster. The new things prompt questions, and that is how the narratives are born. Films, plays and literature involve language and stories. But visual art, I figure, is not really a proper medium for storytelling, so exhibitions have wall texts that explain things. I didn’t like that. I wanted to use images, objects and performance to deliver a story in a very di erent way. I set myself the challenge of telling a story without relying on learned language, without verbal language.
CP
You mentioned working with household items, which leads me to the work that you’ve created that is concerned with domestic space and making private space public. Between 2008 and 2011 you made the work Night Studio, which involved inviting the public into your live/work space on four di erent occasions, each iteration having its own subtitle: New Comer, Far Sight, Wall to Talk to and I Can Tell the Time. Did that act feel vulnerable to you?
JR
I had been travelling a lot in Europe and doing lots of exhibitions, and I wanted to know what would happen without those commitments and deadlines. So I stopped making exhibitions for three years, and I rented a place in Itaewon in Seoul, and started to live and work there. It was a market area, so everyone else was a trader.
When I spray-painted my work, I would take it out onto the street, and all my neighbors were so curious. Do you sell them? How do you eat? How do you buy food? Everyone knew me. I’d always be bringing garbage, metals, wood and so forth back to my place. I used to stay up all night, and then go to sleep around five or six in the morning. Then, within less than
an hour, the fish pedlar would come up my street shouting the list of the fish he had for sale.
The walls protected me, but also isolated me. The inside and outside used totally di erent criteria, di erent ideas and even di erent language. That’s how I felt. I asked myself about my function in this context. There are fans in the work. A fan keeps moving, keeps turning, on and on and on; it doesn’t create anything. I thought it resembled my life somehow.
In the city, you don’t really choose the people around you. You just have to accept them. Understanding the generosity or hospitality of a society involves examining how people do that, when they really have to do it. That was an important issue for me, actually, so it influenced the rest of my practice. Proximity can explain a lot in relation to my practice.
CP
That word, “proximity,” feels distinctly spatial—like thinking about the inside versus the outside of a building. Your practice seems deeply psychological, but equally concerned with systems and how things are organized in space.
JR
It’s true. It’s very private, but it’s always connected to a larger system, because I cannot really ever fully hide.
CP
“Depot” appears on a list of media that you work in, featuring in pieces like Love Your Depot (2019–ongoing). What draws you to the idea of a depot? Do you think of it as a liminal space, or an archive, or a way to trace movements through economic and material systems?
JR
Your question includes the answer: you have identified all the elements of the work.
CP
The project also made me think about museum storage.
JR
Right. Museum storage was an inspiration. The big question for me, though, was where work goes a er the show. Thinking about the physical reality of a work’s a erlife— the prohibitive costs and the spatial requirements. That’s the real struggle, particularly for students and young artists, but for all artists, really. Do you still want great sculpture? If we don’t want to support sculptures to grow, if we don’t have that environment, we’re not going to have any sculptures that we love in the future.
Cassie Packard is a writer and assistant editor of frieze She lives in New York, US.
Jewyo Rhii & Jihyun Jung, Dawn Breaks, 2017, installation view, Art Sonje Center. Photograph: Jaepil Eun
For something to be monumental, it must be significant in importance or size. MINAE KIM’s Monumental Floor (2024) — a circle of teal MDF with a star cutout — isn’t trying to be any of these things. That, I suspect, is part of the joke. Kim has spent her career poking fun at the hubris involved in the making and displaying of art. How else do you explain her transformation in 2024 of Seoul’s Ilmin Museum of Art, for which this installation was conceived, into the “White Circus” of the exhibition’s title?
Monumental Floor, along with the sculptures placed on or around it, was inspired by the museum’s vantage point overlooking Gwanghwamun Square, visible from the third-floor gallery. The performative nature of people interacting in this public space, which Kim explained in our recent conversation is “full of political voices,” reminded her of a circus — both as a spectacle and as a gathering place. This observation led her to merge elements of the circus with features of Seoul’s urban landscape, as seen from a bird’s-eye view. The teal color of the floor piece, for instance, references the painted rooftops typical of 1970s and ’80s Seoul, while its circular form and star-shaped cutout evoke a circus ring.
There’s an implicit critique in this framing, but one that allows for a degree of ambivalence. Would it really be so bad if art was as frivolous — and as fun — as what happens in a big top? “Exhibitions are a kind of circus,” Kim says. “We can put all di erent things in one place and play with them to create a scene — but it is also very temporary.” This impermanence is especially true for Kim’s site-specific practice. Although each of the pieces in “White Circus” is separately titled — including Fiery Gymnastics (2024), which features a wheel referencing Korean exercise parks and the kind of flaming hoop an acrobat might jump through — she views them collectively as a gesamtkunstwerk rooted in a specific context: in this case, the city of Seoul. To remove an installation from that context, she suggests, is to strip it of its meaning.
The absurdist bent in Kim’s practice stems, first and foremost, from the desire to entertain herself. “I like to put some humor in there because my most important audience is me,” she says. “To make work, I have to be interested in what I’m doing.” It seems fitting, then, that Kim views her studio as a place to unwind. “I’m not what you would call a diligent artist,” she says. “I like to read, think, make a drawing or have a nap.”
At the moment, she is working on an as-yet untitled work for an upcoming group show. As in her wider practice, this new piece is based on finding a visual form for an observation drawn from life. She wants to depict the layers of empty excuses certain politicians construct to stay in power — building a labyrinth of curtains “without anything important inside.” As with all her work, Kim’s trademark humor veils a more pointed critique.
Chloe Stead is associate editor of frieze She lives in Berlin, Germany.
Ultimate Pedestal, 2023. Courtesy: One and J.Gallery; photograph: Artifacts
Monumental Floor, 2024. Courtesy: Ilmin Museum of Art; photograph: Studio Oscilloscope
Giant, 2023, installation view, One and J. Gallery. Courtesy: One and J. Gallery; photograph: Artifacts
Min ha Park
It feels misleading to say that MIN HA PARK paints landscapes. At first glance, her abstract canvases — filled with vividly colored geometric shapes seem far removed from anything organic. Yet the repeating triangles, multi-pronged stars and intersecting squares attempt to capture fleeting, ephemeral experiences of environment. The pyramid forms in her Tunnels series (2022–ongoing), for instance, were inspired by traversing the underpasses near her former studio in Seoul’s Yongsan district. “Tunnels represent a kind of flattened time,” Park tells me over video call. “It’s the same thing with painting you can see past, present and future all at once.”
Rather than straightforwardly depicting the landscape, Park is interested in the emotional charge it can produce a focus that grew from her yearning for the seasonal changes of her native Seoul after moving to New York for her studies. “There are so many ginkgo trees in Seoul,” she recalls. “In autumn, you can’t walk outside without stepping on their leaves. It gets really stinky. Then, in spring, azaleas take over, making the city feel really vibrant.” This longing, as well as her participation in a residency in Woodstock, New York, encouraged Park to stop searching for “topics” for her paintings and to focus on her immediate surroundings. By her own account, Park’s interest in art developed late — at the end of her junior year in high school — after many years of playing music. “Like all Korean kids, I learned an instrument,” she says, “but I hated reading music. It felt like something that I could never get right.” Searching for a more creative outlet, she tried writing scores herself before quickly getting frustrated and giving up. Instead, she found freedom in art classes, which encouraged her to apply to the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York where she studied with artists like Jutta Koether and Marilyn Minter.
It was Minter who gave Park a piece of advice that she still lives by. “She always used to say: ‘If you’ve made a painting that looks like a painting then you’ve failed,’” says Park. In trying to “avoid making something that looks like something else,” Park has found a unique visual language that mixes Western and Eastern approaches to painting. “Studying in the US at SVA and then Yale, I learnt about the history of Western painting,” she says. “But the way I think about applying paint on a surface is much more connected to an ‘Asian’ mindset. The paintings might look really simple at a glance, but to get a certain texture, I can apply up to 25 thin layers of paint.”
Right now, Park is working on an as-yet untitled series featuring the winding roads she navigates now that she has moved to the suburbs of Seoul, alongside finishing “Ksana,” a Sanskrit word used in Buddhist philosophy that means “split second.” Started in 2021, the series was inspired by automatic street lights on a stretch of highway that follows the Han River. “Sometimes when I’m driving, they turn on when it’s still light,” Park explains. “These moments overlap and you don’t know if it’s day or night.” From this fleeting experience, she aims to make 100 paintings — a monumental undertaking that utilizes time itself as a medium. Park is used to producing at scale. Owing to the slow drying time of oil paint, she sometimes works on ten paintings at a time, using tape to define the straight edges. “Working in this way you never see the whole painting at once,” she explains. “The end is always a bit of a reveal to me.”
Underpass, Midnight, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Whistle; photograph: Ian Yang
The Pit, 2023. Commissioned by ARKO Art Center. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Yongjoon Choi
IKKIBAWIKRRR takes its name from the Korean words ikki (moss) and bawi (rock), which together mean “moss-covered rock” — something natural, grounded and resistant to erosion. The appended “Krrr” is an onomatopoeic Korean word suggesting a rolling motion. Together, the name encapsulates a potent ethos that runs through ikkibawiKrrr’s work, which thoughtfully explores themes of identity, displacement, labor, colonial history and queer subjectivity.
Founded in 2021 by independent filmmakers Jieun Cho, Jungwon Kim and Gyeol Ko, the trio prefers to define themselves as a “visual research band.” Emerging from a shared desire to challenge conventional storytelling in Korea — and grounded in experimental and documentary practices — they have since become one of Asia’s most daring and dynamic film production collectives, renowned for their political acuity, artistic rigor and unwavering commitment to amplifying marginalized voices.
In 2020, the group’s debut project Herrings arose from a grassroots appeal by residents of Gangneung who opposed the construction of a thermoelectric power plant. The artists worked with the community to stage a seaside performance near the site, where locals — wearing fish-shaped masks they had crafted in earlier workshops — used song and dance to turn protest into a vivid public ritual.
ikkibawiKrrr’s profile has continued to grow, and in 2022, it was included in documenta fifteen, curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. What sets the visual research band apart is not only its artistic output but also its political stance. In a global media landscape often driven by commercial success and nationalistic narratives, the group insists on telling stories that are personal, sometimes uncomfortable and often politically charged. Their work is usually low-budget but rich in texture and meaning, reflecting a careful, handcrafted and conscientious approach to film.
While residing on Jeju Island, the collective collaborated with local haenyeo — older women who dive in the ocean, often holding their breath for extended periods to harvest shellfish and seaweed, a long-established tradition. The resulting work, Seaweed Story (2022), features a group of these women gathered on the shore, performing a collective chorus that evokes elements of their lived experience. This evocative piece was presented at Frieze Seoul in 2023, alongside the interactive performance Flavors of the Sea (2023), in which visitors to the fair were o ered edible seaweed. In a video explaining this work, members of the collective describe their wish to operate like the moss referenced in their name — a metaphor for being low-impact yet far-reaching, quietly essential to the ecosystem. Sharing, they explain, is central to their practice — their work is porous and aspires to sustained, open engagement with both audiences and collaborators.
Tropical Story (2022) explores the enduring imprints of the Pacific War and Japanese colonialism through film and photography. The artists trace forgotten military infrastructures — airstrips, bases and landing zones — originally built by coerced Indigenous and migrant labor, now overtaken by jungle and fading from collective memory. ikkibawiKrrr is also actively engaged in creating a more just ecosystem for independent filmmakers in Asia, organizing screenings, workshops and community-based events. Its collaboration with other Asian and global collectives demonstrates a commitment to solidarity across borders.
Sean Burns is an artist, writer and associate editor of frieze He lives in London, UK.
Buddha High Five, 2024. Courtesy: the artist
Seaweed Story, 2022. Courtesy: the artist
Choi Goen
Recently, a friend told me about watching a well-known British sculptor wander into a derelict garden shed, return with a rusty tin box full of bits of metal and carefully pick through it — meticulously selecting which old staples he deemed worth saving. It may be a cliché to say that artists can find beauty in the most mundane places, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The challenge comes in persuading the rest of us to see as they see, with the most successful artists able to show us the beauty in the ordinary, to recognize the di erence between one tarnished scrap of metal and another.
CHOI GOEN is one of those artists. She collects everyday objects and uses them to create sculptures and installations that heighten our awareness of the urban environment that surrounds us. Piping is a recurrent material in her work: from Gloria (2024) — polished copper pipes bent into soft curves, piercing the exhibition wall — to Airlock (2024), a freestanding spiral formed from a length of manipulated stainless steel pipe. Normally hidden under floorboards or within walls, pipes are an integral part of our built environment: they transport water and gas, electric wires and cables. And, as Choi observes in a video interview for frieze in 2024, they spread “like blood vessels throughout the city” — a vital component of the system of living.
Other normally invisible processes that fascinate Choi include refrigeration and air circulation — reflected in installations like Torso (2022) and White Home Wall: Welcome (2024), which reconfigure household appliances into sculptural forms. There is a Donald Judd-esque quality to these minimal objects, and yet Choi’s use of readymades di ers from Judd’s carefully fabricated sculptures. “My work involves breaking and deconstructing readymade things,” she explains in the same interview. “I reflect on the relationships, power dynamics and myself within [this process]. [It] becomes the subject and attitude of my work.”
The underlying theme across these series is the material foundations of technology — an aspect Choi believes is too often overlooked in favor of viewing technology solely as a concept. Both Torso and White Home Wall: Welcome use appliances which were once coveted but later discarded, and which still bear traces of their former lives. For the latter work, Choi collected and cut up approximately 60 air conditioning units, arranging them in the order in which they were produced. First presented at last year’s Frieze Seoul, sections of these units were hung from the ceiling in an arc — a celestial graveyard of technological obsolescence.
In a fast-paced city like Seoul, obsolescence equals death. Choi has said that she doesn’t believe she has the authority as an artist to bring abandoned objects back to life. Yet, she is satisfied with the idea that her sculptures and installations draw details at the overlooked edges of our cities — and attention — to the center. By bringing these peripheral elements into focus, she encourages a quiet shift in perspective — one that, with every turn of a tap or opening of a fridge, reminds us of our dependence on the often-unseen systems and processes that sustain urban life.
Material Pool, 2016–21. Courtesy: Suwon Museum of Art
Trophy, 2022. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: CJY ART STUDIO
Gloria, 2024. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Vak Dongkyun
When SUN WOO moved from her native Korea to Canada at the age of ten, she and her mother were the only women of color in the town in Ontario, where they lived. The sense of displacement they experienced, along with the challenges posed by isolation, continues to influence Sun Woo’s work, which includes unconventional oil and acrylic paintings on linen as well as sculptural installations crafted from carved wood, metal and resin.
In Canada, Sun Woo was drawn to solitary activities such as exploring the suburban landscape or immersing herself in the emerging online world of social media. Her earliest images were not created as a conscious artistic practice but rather as composite visuals intended to be shared on internet forums. Aged ten, she taught herself to use Adobe Photoshop — an essential tool that continues to play a key role in the images she produces today. She manipulates photographs of herself or other Asian women, intersecting them with mysterious landscapes and seemingly benign household objects — items that mediate human experience or carry particularly gendered connotations, including foldable drying racks (Room of Haze, 2023) and cheese graters (Cuts and Barriers, 2025).
A sense of the folkloric inflects much of her work. Evocations of the female body via hair, legs, hands, sit alongside self-consciously old-fashioned objects, like something out of a fairytale or a Brothers Grimm story, such as mysterious wells (Portal, 2024) or antique Western furniture (Transmissions and Errors, 2025). Her scenery draws on a kind of jilted romanticism reminiscent of 19th-century German painters such as Caspar David Friedrich but also speaks to her experiences in North America and other landscapes. Throughout, there’s a feeling that sublime nature has been interrupted — undermined, even — by the awkwardness of dismembered bodies or the fuddy-duddiness of cumbersome oak furniture.
In The Chorus (2024), for example, a steaming, black grand piano floats in a large body of water at the mouth of a cave, its open lid revealing its inner mechanism. Black hair cascades down its partly submerged sides, while in the background, an oversized, ornate harp appears to process toward it. Woo endows these manufactured musical instruments with human attributes like long, glossy hair, yet they behave like marine animals in a natural setting. The work has a dreamlike energy reminiscent of the surrealism of Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst.
Upon her return to Korea following her graduation in 2017 from Columbia University in New York, Sun Woo’s sense of alienation was heightened by the realization that her generation’s hyper-connectivity — and the technology that facilitates it — was paradoxically giving rise to a sense of rootlessness. Cultural identity and technology function as twin engines of both connection and alienation in Sun Woo’s practice, positioning her simultaneously as subject and object, participant and outsider. Her work emerges from — and reflects on — this fluid state of being, shaped by a continual negotiation with instability. In landscapes that seem to shift beneath her feet, Sun Woo navigates questions of belonging, perception and the self with a sensibility attuned to dissonance and duality.
Her fractured and enigmatic images function as a map of displacement; her works engender a feeling of unease by playing with scale and drawing on an almost surrealist trope of situating bodily parts and domestic objects in unexpected dialog. But within this practice lies a subtle desire to push against societal expectations of women, challenge the social mores of her home country and shed light on the experiences of those displaced.
The Chorus, 2024. Courtesy: Gallery Vacancy; photograph: Jong Hyun Seo
Portal, 2024. Courtesy: Gallery Vacancy
CHE Onejoon 최원준
Central to CHE ONEJOON’s practice is a radically expanded notion of the documentary — not confined to cinematic or journalistic conventions but encompassing all artistic strategies that engage with lived realities, social memory and collective imagination. For CHE, documentary is not so much a genre as a mode of being in relation to the world. In his 30s, CHE completed residencies at Le Pavillon at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam — key experiences for his development and decision to work across a wide spectrum of media, including film, video installation, performance, sound and music-based projects, without privileging any one form.
CHE collects and works with archival materials — such as books, newspapers, and documents — which he carefully edits and recontextualizes in his installations to construct layered and open-ended narratives. These materials are not presented as definitive proof, but rather as historical and relational grounding for his chosen subject matter. This research-driven process is not an academic exercise, but one that grows out of lived experience, long-term engagement and artistic intuition. The resulting works bring together diverse forms and media, shaped more by context than convention.
His recent work centers on reimagining and enacting Afro-Asian solidarity, drawing particular inspiration from the spirit of Bandung — a set of ideals that emerged from the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in the Indonesian city. At the heart of CHE’s practice is a commitment to fostering solidarity within the Asian context, with a strong focus on artistic practices rooted in Korea — especially those emerging from the lived experiences of residents in Bosan-dong, often referred to as “African Town” in the US military camp town of Dongducheon, where he operates the community art project, Space AfroAsia.
In 2021, he cofounded the Collective AfroAsia with Sun A Moon. For each project, new collaborators are invited to join, resulting in a fluid membership that changes depending on the work being produced. For example, Osinachi, who collaborated on two music videos, was an active member of the collective for three years. Currently, participants in the collective’s macramé workshop are preparing to exhibit in the Philippines.
For Collective AfroAsia’s project AfroZia (2025) — which premiered at SONGEUN in Seoul in mid-August and is also part of a parallel program during Frieze Seoul in September — CHE assembled a K-pop group composed of three second-generation African immigrant teenagers and three Korean teenagers. He aims to explore the idea of solidarity among young people, who represent the immediate future. Although these teenagers live in the same neighborhood and attend the same schools, they often remain socially separated. In a Korean society that is only beginning to embrace multiculturalism, building cultural connections across racial and ethnic lines is increasingly important. The project uses the hybrid nature of K-pop as a platform to express minority solidarity and explore new forms of collective identity.
CHE’s work engages with the entangled histories and presentday realities of Afro-Asian relations, with particular attention to questions of migration, solidarity, and postcolonial memory. At the core of his process is relationship-building; for CHE, meaningful interaction takes place not only in the final presentation but in the making, research and conversations that shape the work.
Powpow, 2025, video still. Courtesy: the artist
Capital Black, 2022, installation view, Hakgojae Gallery
Powpow, 2025, video still. Courtesy: the artist
CASSIE
PACKARD
I’m curious about your trajectory from being a singer-songwriter to developing hardware for musical performances, and how you arrived at robotics theater.
BYUNGJUN
KWON
Well, it’s a long journey—more than 30 years—but I’ll make it short. In the 1990s and early 2000s, I was an underground musician, a singer-songwriter based in Seoul. I shi ed from alternative rock into other genres, like experimental electronic music, but the music scene felt a bit like it was just repeating itself, and I wanted to be new and experimental. In 2005, I moved to The Hague in the Netherlands, to take a technology course at the Royal Conservatoire. →
Ochetuji Ladderbot, 2022. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Park Seungki
Robot Crossing A Single Line Bridge, 2023. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Park Seungki
Dancing Ladders, 2022. Courtesy: MMCA
Byungjun Kwon (b. 1971) /
Interviewby Cassie Packard
→ I went on to do a master’s in art science. I was deeply influenced by my mother, who was a piano teacher and had very strong opinions on how to play music. While I agree with her belief that if you want to master one instrument, you need a very strict learning process, I wanted to build my own instruments rather than learning traditions.
A er finishing my master’s, I started working at STEIM in Amsterdam. They developed experimental electronic music devices for artists and musicians, so it was the perfect place for me, because they were more focused on hardware than so ware.
I worked there as a hardware engineer for three or four years, realizing other people’s ideas and solving their technical problems. I met artists from all over the world while I was there.
Then I came back to Korea in 2011 and started working on my own projects and performances. Musical devices gradually expanded into full-scale stage devices, and led to me building robots. In the end, these robots became actors or my colleagues.
CP
Tell me more about the tenor of your relationship with these robots. Do you think of them as collaborators?
BK
I do. I have such beautiful memories of my time as an underground musician, belonging to that community. A er that, I had seven or eight years living outside Korea as a foreigner. These experiences made me think about people at the margins of society—artists, but also various minorities. I started meeting them and trying to do something together.
Korea is becoming more and more international these days, especially in rural areas, where young women come from Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and the Philippines. In elementary schools, more than half the children’s mothers are from di erent countries now. I went to record their
lullabies, sung in their own languages.
In 2018, over 500 Yemeni refugees arrived on Jeju Island. It was a new experience for Koreans and they didn’t know what to do. On the right and the le , people were saying, “Go back to your own country.” It was harsh. I went to Jeju to record the migrants’ voices and their singing. I made my own headphones. But I wasn’t satisfied with the project. I thought: Maybe I’m a bit naïve—I’m just like a journalist, collecting their voices and presenting them to audiences. I needed something more interpretive, a turning point. And then I came up with this idea of robots.
CP What was your first project with the robots?
BK
In 2018, I had a solo show at Alternative Space LOOP in Seoul, and I made 12 robots. They all have only one hand: six of them a right hand, six of them a le . And they o er their hands to the audience.
The reactions were really interesting. Some people were scared, some wanted to shake hands with them, some gave them coins. Some people even cried when they saw the robots —I didn’t expect that.
So I called it “mechanical theater.” For one hour, there was no human intervention, only robots. And at the end, they all dance together in the hall to techno music.
I’m still doing this work and developing new robots. There is one called Ochetuji Ladderbot who follows the Buddhist tradition of bowing as it makes its way along the road. This is something people haven’t seen before. They only see robots doing useful things; they haven’t seen them doing unnecessary or impractical things.
CP
In light of your background in music, when you’re making robotic theater, are you still
primarily led by sound? Or are you working across various media at once, and they all start to coalesce?
BK
Sound is my starting point. Right now I am working on a 3.5–4 m tall robot called Ahae. As it walks, it makes sounds with its legs. For the Seoul Mediacity Biennale in August, I’m thinking of using three or four of them. It’ll be like they are tap dancing, but it will look more shamanic, like a tribal ritual.
At this point in time, the robots are puppets, moving in accordance with how I program them. They’re not autonomous. But I’m thinking about giving them free will—I don’t know how, yet, but I will, and then it will become even more interesting to work with them. Going back to your question about me viewing the robots as collaborators: I started this project out of frustration with humans. These robots aren’t just my colleagues, they aren’t just my friends, they’re important beings. I’ve been with them for seven or eight years and I spend so much time with them. It’s more than an artwork for me.
Cassie Packard is a writer and assistant editor of frieze. She lives in New York, US.
CLooking Ahead
SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul. Photograph: Jihyun Jung
“Panorama” brings together eight Korean artists whose practices, while individually grounded, resonate within a shared contemporary moment. The title may suggest a sweeping, totalizing view that reduces complex realities to legible images, but in fact the exhibition reframes the “panoramic” as a series of immersive encounters. The artists included have all been selected for this year’s Korean Artists Today (KAT) initiative, organized as part of the international promotion program of the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS). Spanning generations, media and conceptual frameworks, each artist occupies a dedicated space, allowing viewers to engage more intimately with their distinct questions and critical inquiries.
Entering the lobby, visitors are greeted with Choi Goen’s new sculptural intervention that exposes elements of industrial infrastructure typically concealed from view. Known for her subtle repurposing of materials, Choi continues her inquiry into the hidden systems that shape everyday experience. Elsewhere, Jewyo Rhii revisits her project Love Your Depot (2019–ongoing), which calls attention to art sidelined by market and institutional logic. The artist’s signature storage facility-cum-laboratory will operate as a living archive of art for the duration of the show, mediating on rhythms of care, displacement and return.
A number of artists in the exhibition reflect on diasporic experience, though in markedly di erent registers. Minae Kim’s siteresponsive sculptures probe semiotic process; on this occasion, she expands on her earlier work to examine themes of social withdrawal and fragility. Sun Woo, by contrast, approaches the ambulatory body as a hybrid form, fusing organic materials with 3D models and machines to evoke bodily states of fragmentation and adaptation.
Byungjun Kwon focuses on embodied listening to create an immersive audio environment that encourages visitors’ sensory navigation through the museum space.
Political legacies shaping diplomatic alliances and migration also surface. CHE Onejoon’s much-anticipated new multimedia installation constructs imagined narratives of cultural exchange between African and Asian youth, drawing on the artist’s research over a number of years into sites such as abandoned military bunkers, North Korean monuments in Africa and former red-light districts.
Several works engage SONGEUN’s distinctive architecture in dialogue. Min ha Park’s painterly interpretations of ephemeral elements—light, air, memory—displayed along the elongated corridor of the second floor echo the urban landscape framed by the windows opposite, while the visual research band ikkibawiKrrr’s immersive installation evoking the presence of Mireuk, a spiritual figure perceived to transcend time and space, takes up the building’s iconic subterranean void.
Amid this diversity of approaches, “Panorama” conveys a shared sensitivity to movement and time in a continually shi ing world. Its artists delve into what is o en invisible or unspoken, tracing the passages of people, objects and ideas across temporal and spatial thresholds. As such, the exhibition o ers a timely introduction to some of Korea’s most active and critically engaged artists.
“Panorama,” SONGEUN, until October 16, www.songeun.or.kr
Sooyoung Leam is an independent curator and researcher. She lives in Seoul, Korea.
Jewyo Rhii, Love Your Depot, 2019–ongoing. Courtesy: MMCA
MATTHEW MCLEAN
You began your career at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. You were the youngest-ever curator there at the time. Were you very aware of that?
SOOK-KYUNG LEE
Yes. Everyone said I was very young and inexperienced. There was an exam to get the job, like with the civil service. I really learned on the job, and I fi nished my MA during those first years working there. Then I was given an opportunity to work on a British contemporary art show, which took me to London, where I decided to do another master’s. →
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Primitive, 2009. Courtesy: the artist and Kick the Machine Films/ Illumination Films; photograph: Tate
Sook-Kyung Lee, Director, The Whitworth (2025) Photograph: David Oates
Interviewby Matthew McLean
→
MM
How was your first experience of the UK?
SKL
I really liked the British academic environment because it was quite di erent to my experience in Korea, which was largely about studying and remembering things. The British way was about engaging deeply with philosophy and theories, and I really enjoyed writing. It gave me the appetite to study further, and so, I decided to do a PhD at the University of Essex, where I was immersed in post-structuralism and feminism, in particular. All the while, I continued my work as an independent curator and kept in touch with artists in Korea and internationally. That transnational thinking later became very much my curatorial method.
MM
Was there one project that was a turning point for you?
SKL
I think it was working as the international coordinator for the Korean International Ceramic Biennale. I researched on European contemporary artists working with ceramics. I was drawn to Richard Deacon and other artists who use clay, rather than coming from a cra angle. It was interesting to think about transnational connections in focused way, thinking about just one material.
MM
There’s a very particular ceramic tradition in Korean culture. How did colleagues in Korea react to your approach of bringing perhaps seemingly disparate things together?
SKL
People were very curious. I also continued to write for art magazines in Korea, and that helped me think about how the British and Korean art scenes could connect. My first big institutional role in the UK was at Tate Liverpool, and getting to know these places outside London was important for me.
MM
How long were you at Tate?
SKL
Five years at Tate Liverpool and then 11 at Tate Modern. Funnily enough, in 2014, when I was at Tate, at the beginning of KAMS’ life, I did a project in collaboration with them—an exchange curatorial workshop between Korea and London. It’s great to see how their work has continued to thrive and grow.
MM
How would you say Tate changed during your time there?
SKL
It was really exciting to begin the Asia Pacific art collection because there wasn’t really much there. It was exciting to think about building a collection for a nation which is very international, open and multicultural. The Asia Pacific committee was the second to be established of the eight regional and medium specific acquisition committees that now exist.
MM
Is there one acquisition that you feel particularly proud of?
SKL
That is hard. I think probably an eight-channel video work, Primitive (2009) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. At the beginning, East Asia was really the focus and my area of expertise. I built quite substantial holdings in a relatively short time of works by artists from Korea, China and Japan. Then we began looking at Southeast Asia and Asia as a whole. Apichatpong was quite young at the time and it was just before he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
MM
In 2021, you were appointed artistic director of the 14th Gwangju Biennale 2023. From an international perspective, it’s one of the most prestigious biennales in Asia and certainly the one in Korea that is best known, with such an interesting history. Did this feel like a big moment in your career?
SKL
Definitely. It meant a great deal to me because I remember the first one in 1995 and that was a real eye-opener for me—seeing such a diverse selection of artists in one place and visiting Gwangju, for the first time. Also, as a Korean, feeling the collective debt to the city, knowing about the uprising, and that this was a reason for them to choose that location.
When I was invited to make a proposal, it was really important for me to think about my own journey as a Korean-born curator working internationally. I wanted to make it worthwhile for Korean audiences to visit and especially for the local audience to see something meaningful. Also for international audiences to engage with Gwangju’s history.
I wanted to convey the idea of a changing world. Growing up, I was deeply influenced by the concepts and life choices of Eastern philosophies. I wanted to convey that too. I don’t think art can solve world problems, but it can help people to solve them.
The artists I chose were quite international in terms of global reach: historical figures, but also emerging ones and Indigenous artists. It was intentionally broad, with di erent voices, but all the artists probably shared a quiet kind of activism and resistance, and a genuine desire to change the world for the better.
MM
In 2023, you became director of the Whitworth and Professor of Curatorial Practices at the University of Manchester. What led you to make that move?
SKL
I really like the UK’s Northwest. I enjoyed living in Liverpool. I like the way people interact with each other: there’s a real optimism in the city. I think Manchester is having a moment—there’s an energy and a commitment that I share to making art accessible to all. The city is very supportive of the museum and I really appreciate the connection with the university, where research is valued and I am surrounded by colleagues who are
dedicated experts in their fields. Also, the collection, which extends beyond contemporary art, is absolutely fantastic.
MM
What do you have planned at the Whitworth this fall?
SKL
Our main exhibition will be with Santiago Yahuarcani. He’s in his 60s and it will be his first international solo show. He has been in a lot of biennales, and the work I showed in Gwangju is now in the collection of MoMA, New York. His way of showing the mythological, but also real stories of genocide, in his paintings is so gentle and touching. I think it will be great for audiences here to see a global perspective, how we can share someone’s stories and understand their su erings, but also their hopes. Also, we will be in Korea with a collaboration with Cheongju Cra Biennale that opens during Frieze Week. It’s called the “Hyundai Translocal Series” and a ten-year project funded by Hyundai Motors. We are the inaugural partner and there will be new commissions by four Korean and four Indian artists, as well as a selection of Indian textiles from the Whitworth’s collection. A er Korea, the project will go to the National Cra Museum in New Delhi in February next year, and then to the Whitworth in July 2026.
MM
The perfect encapsulation of your transnational dialogues in action. It’s funny, I remember reading an interview when you said, “I never set out to be a ‘Korean’ curator.” But a project like this—that looks at heritage, and cra as a form of art—does feel to me very “Korean.”
SKL
I think I might have said I’ve never really been a “Korean art specialist” [laughs]. But yes, the methodology I tend to be drawn to may indeed be about those Korean perspectives. I’d love to think more about that, one day.
26 Preview “Ayoung Kim” at MoMA PS1
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Seoul, Ayoung Kim (b. 1979) found herself using food-delivery apps almost every day. Intrigued by the gig economy workers who dropped o her daily sustenance before sprinting to the next destination, Kim began shadowing a female delivery rider. Hoisted on the back seat of the motorcycle, the artist experienced for herself the dizzying, everincreasing speed with which the riders, and society at large, rushes to fulfil every possible need.
This is the premise of Kim’s solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, which will open this November. Featuring the US debut of her acclaimed Delivery Dancer video trilogy (2022–24) alongside new work, the exhibition promises to highlight the full range of Kim’s worldbuilding powers and will, for the first time, present the video installations together. Synthesizing generative AI, videogame simulation and live-action footage, Delivery Dancer depicts two female riders, Ernst Mo and En Storm (anagrams of “monster”), who work for the platform Delivery Dancers and its AI overlord, Dancemaster. Kim conjures a vision of Seoul that glitches with half-rendered infrastructure: the usual razzle-dazzle of the city is transmogrified into a Blade Runner-esque dystopia washed in a palette of flickering blues and radioactive greens.
Kim has established herself as a fixture in the contemporary Korean art scene for her rare combination of technical mastery
(she was trained in motion graphics and lens-based media) and profound humanistic ability to summon the possibilities of multiple, simultaneous worlds. She has described velocity as a key currency in contemporary society, and the “accelerationist symptom” that permeates Korea in particular. In his 1977 book Speed and Politics, the French architect and theorist Paul Virilio presciently posits that speed would be the primary force shaping the contemporary world in all of its vectors—economic, social and political. He suggests that to understand subjectivity under late capitalism beyond the 20th century, we need to start from the tyranny of inexorable acceleration. Kim’s work, and the upcoming exhibition, do not embody such a techno-determinist view of contemporary society, but neither is she a techno-optimist. Rather, she takes the tight marriage of time, flexible labor and capital that sca olds and stultifies our algorithmic reality and pulls it apart for us to examine more carefully. A er making its rounds to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo earlier this year, Delivery Dancer will arrive at PS1 exactly when required.
“Ayoung Kim,” MoMA PS1, November 6, 2025–March 16, 2026, www.momaps1.org
Emily Chun is a writer. She lives in New York, US.
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery Hyundai
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery Hyundai
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, 2024, video still. Courtesy: the artist and ACC
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, 2024, installation view of ACC Future Prize 2024. Courtesy: the artist and ACC
Solo presentations by emerging artists Byungjun Kwon and Min ha Park at this year’s Frieze London represent a new chapter for the government agency KAMS (Korean Arts Management Services). Until now, the agency’s projects, which are aimed at furthering understanding of Korean art overseas, have focused on promoting it at global fairs via grants and collaborations, through art publications and within institutions. Kwon and Park are among the eight artists selected for this year’s KAT (Korean Artists Today)—KAMS’ annual initiative begun in 2023, to promote less-exposed emerging and mid-career artists. This is the first time that artists from the KAT cohort will be highlighted in this way, and it marks KAMS’ first direct partnership with Frieze. “It’s a core pillar of the KAT program,” explains Jiyoung Yun, team lead of KAMS’ Visual Arts International Development Team, “and a significant step in our longterm commitment to international engagement.”
It’s thanks in part to this long-term drive for outreach that Korea’s burgeoning art scene will not be news to the international audience the fair attracts, or culture-loving Londoners. Last year, established Korean names with projects in the UK’s capital included Seoul architect Minsuk Cho’s Serpentine Pavilion and Geumhyung Jeong’s DIY animatronic figures fusing skeletons with high-tech at the ICA. This year, London-based Do Ho Suh’s haunting paper and fabric recreations of home can be seen at Tate Modern. “There’s a growing recognition and curiosity about Korean art practices in London,” says Yun. “It’s a very important platform for global influence. As a city with a deep history of engaging with issues of diaspora, identity and postcolonial discourse, it offers a uniquely receptive context. Its audiences are attuned to layered narratives and experimental forms—an ideal environment for presenting the complexity, nuance and sensorial richness of contemporary Korean art.” She points out, however, that people are usually only familiar with the heavy hitters, amounting to a handful of artists. The presentation at Frieze looks to go beyond this.
On the face of it, the artists selected for the London art fair debut seem a fruitful meeting of opposites, showcasing the diversity of Korea’s art scene. Kwon makes interactive installations and sculptures, and performances drawing on robotics and his background in electro music. He is mindful of the human implications of the new tech in which South Korea is a frontrunner. Min ha Park, on the other hand, makes radiant abstract paintings that respond to the natural world, thoughts and feelings. Probe beyond that initial impression, however, and shared concerns emerge, speaking to global questions as much as local ones.
“Both artists engage deeply with themes central to contemporary art today,” Yun explains. “Sensation, temporality, memory, embodiment and technological mediation. Through this pairing, we aim to show that Korean art is not defined solely by its cultural tradition or visual symbols, but by
its rigorous and layered engagement with the conditions of being in the present moment. [Their work] offers a compelling representation of the depth, nuance and evolving nature of Korean contemporary art today.” In London, in addition to the presentation at the art fair, Kwon, Park and the project curators will also participate in a talks program at Frieze’s permanent gallery, No.9 Cork Street.
The international outreach of KAMS this year is multifaceted. Work by the 2025 KAT cohort can be seen together in the group exhibition “Panorama” at SONGEUN Art Space during Frieze Seoul this September. At the same time, KAMS brought international curators and critics to Korea itself for a four-day program of studio visits and discussions.
KAMS has come a long way since it launched almost 20 years ago in 2006. Then the focus was more on “Korea’s domestic arts ecosystem,” says Yun. With schemes hinged on strengthening distribution, rather than funding the creation of artworks, its core aims now include overseas expansion and exchange, arts management consultancy and building domestic and international art markets. The International Development team was established last year, distinguishing it from KAMS Information and Distribution teams, and giving fresh focus to a complex, evolving program aimed at “building sustainable pathways for Korean art abroad.” In connecting the Korean and global art scenes, its work is also “a vital conduit for cultural diplomacy.”
Korea is a remarkable phenomenon in an increasingly isolationist world where military might frequently takes precedence over cultural influence. The country punches far above its weight in terms of soft power, with an art scene that joins its famed wave of K-pop, television programs and movies. The success of Korea in establishing itself as a cultural player means it is fast becoming the go-to center in Asia for artmarket behemoths, with big American and European galleries setting up shop in Seoul to show their rosters of international artists.
While Yun welcomes the increased opportunities that Western galleries bring for local talents, she points out that the work of government arts agencies like KAMS is about nurturing culture over commerce. Rather than profit and big names, “cultural sovereignty” and a “sustainable cultural ecosystem” are the goals. What’s too often overlooked by the market—“emerging artists, experimental practices, regionally rooted initiatives and research-based programs”—is where government support comes in. Beyond what the market provides, the government, she says, “is uniquely positioned to envision the future through the arts and ensure that all citizens have access to meaningful cultural experiences.”
Skye Sherwin is a writer. She lives in Rochester, UK.
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이주요 Jewyo Rhii 김민애 Minae Kim
Min ha Park
Min ha Park, Nostos, Drizzling, 2024.
Courtesy: the artist and Whistle; photograph: Ian Yang
