6 Shows to See in Seoul During Frieze

As the third edition of Frieze Seoul heads into its final day today, many international visitors are likely already on their way home. Some may have already left to head to the Gwangju Biennale, which is now in its 15th iteration and is curated this year by Nicolas Bourriaud. (Some of the festivities started on Thursday, causing  many to leave Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning.) A few might continue to the Busan Biennale, which is also coinciding with Frieze this year. 

But there is still a lot to see around Seoul, from Anicka Yi’s first survey in Asia to a major group exhibition looking at how Asia-based women artists have used their bodies in their work and much more. 

Below, a look at six exhibitions ARTnews attended during the jam-packed fair week.

Anicka Yi at Leeum Museum of Art

The most anticipated exhibition of the week was Anicka Yi’s solo show, which is jointly organized by the Leeum Museum of Art and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, where it will travel next March. Titled “There Exists Another Evolution, But This One,” the exhibition submerges visitors into an all-black environment that is typical of many of Yi’s past exhibitions. The survey presents a look back at over a decade of Yi’s production, which has beguiled viewers for just as long. Aside from introductory wall text, there isn’t much context provided for the works on view, which can make it difficult to parse, but that also enhances the show’s otherworldly appeal. 

There’s an unmistakable beauty to her tempura-fried flowers, which are mounted onto sheets of plexiglass and arranged in such a way that they appear as loose, floating abstractions when seen from a distance. Her mechanized, octopus-like sculptures, which here hang above shallow pools of inky water, tantalize as they move and shudder. Her 22-minute, 3D film The Genome Flavor (2016), which memorably showed at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, still holds up. 

Despite the strength of Yi’s work, I was left wanting a stronger curatorial voice that makes the case for why Yi has been such an important artist over the past several years, one which coalesces her one-off shows of different bodies of work into an overarching artistic vision. Don’t despair, though: where curators Gina Lee and Peter Eleey fall short, Yi more than compensates with her latest video work. Running only 16 minutes, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up The Light of The Moon is a mesmerizing piece that is part of a larger AI project titled Emptiness, for which an algorithm has been “trained on years of artwork produced by Anicka Yi Studio,” according to the wall text. The section I caught featured floating objects—flowers, tentacles, bacteria cells—in lush colors. It at once feels familiar to Yi’s work and excitingly new.

I can’t wait to see where this project leads. 

“Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)

The best show I saw this week was, by far, “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists.” There is a lot on view across the exhibition’s six sections—with titles like “Flexible Territories of Sexuality” and “Bodies•Objects•Language”—and more than 130 artists from 11 countries across Asia. Several of the artists are established art stars, like Yoko Ono (represented by Cut Piece), but many are likely only well-known in their home countries. Walking through the cacophony of diverse perspectives on how the body can be “a place where various ideologies and situations intersect,” according to the introductory wall text, I was reminded of my experience seeing “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” which opened at the Hammer Museum in 2017. That exhibition helped rewrite the canon internationally and gave greater acclaim to the artists featured in it; “Connecting Bodies” has that same possibility. It desperately needs to travel. 

Among the first video works in the exhibition is Mako Idemitsu’s tour of Womanhouse, the ur-work of feminist collaboration from 1972 that itself touched upon the many themes explored in “Connecting Bodies.” I was mystified by the haunting photographs of Korean artist Park Youngsook, whose work I had encountered earlier in the day at the booth of Arario Gallery. A 1992 painting titled The Fall of America by Ryu Jun Hwa is an assemblage of various sapphic-looking scenes that seem sexy, steamy, and perhaps even dangerous. The work seems to imply that it is lesbianism (or queerness more generally) that has aided in the US’s destruction; what’s powerful about it is that a number of the figures appear to be Asian women. In a room focusing on goddesses and cosmologies, the textile-based works of Lee Bul, Pacita Abad, and Mrinalini Mukherjee share space. A subsequent room has a 1987 photograph by Joo Myong-Duck from her “Artist Series” of Bul, wearing a sequin leotard and holding a crude baby sculpture upside down as she stares at the viewer, one arm on her hip. Elsewhere are three Artificial Placenta (1961/2003) works by Tabe Mitsuko that look more sterile than cozy.

There is so much to take in here, I wish I had had more time to delve deeper. 

Korean Heritage Art Exhibition at Changdeokgung Palace

One of the week’s more off-the-beaten-path exhibitions is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it show. The exhibition is located at the Changdeokgung Palace—a royal residence for 270 years and in use as such until 1989. The show doesn’t have an official title and only lasts for six days. In one set of buildings, several works of craft are displayed in the alcoves that were once used as sleeping quarters. The focus here is on the generational lineage of craft, with several parents and children showing work together, as well as more contemporary works that takes remixes that legacy. Among the highlights are a pair of hanji-paper-and-bamboo parasols by the last family who makes this style of umbrella; four lacquerware items each made by father, mother, son, and daughter; a large cabinet bedazzled in an ungodly amount of mother of pearl; and an embroidered screen by Bang Chae-ok, who also happens to be the curator’s mother.

“SeMA Omnibus: At the End of the World Split Endlessly” at Seoul Museum of Art

The Seoul Museum of Art (or SeMA for short) currently has a collection show on view split across its four venues, which “adopt[s] the omnibus form of storytelling that weaves independent short stories around a single theme,” according to exhibition text.

“At the End of the World Split Endlessly,” the section at the Seosomun Main Branch, looks at the collection through the lens of the various mediums that artists employ, in what the museum calls a “post-medium/post-media era.” The exhibition, which takes inspiration and part of its structure from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths, is a bit uneven in the way most collection shows tend to be. Han Un-Sung, for example, has on view terrible drawings of fruit that are part of his plan “to produce 1,500 pieces in 30 years.” In a quote printed next to these works, he admits “that even if an artist produce works throughout their whole lives, only about 10 percent of the total are considered relatively decent.” He might want to spend more time on completing the final 300 he has left to go. 

But there are exceptional works on view too. A video work from 1977 by Lee Kang-So, who recently joined the roster of Thaddaeus Ropac, is a knockout. Depending upon when you happen upon the nearly 30-minute video, the screen may be all white or mostly black (slightly flickering as if the original film is glitching). But if you wait long enough, you’ll see it transition to the artist standing in front of the camera and beginning to paint in either direction. 

Bridging the timeline is one of SeMA’s most recent acquisitions: Nonfacial Portrait (2018–20) by Seoul-based collective Shinseungback Kimyonghun. For the work, which entered the collection last year, the artists have embraced technology to create a series of portraits with sinister undertones. On a table next to one such semi-abstracted work is a set of “Painting Guidelines,” the first of which reads: “Paint a portrait of the subject, but its face must not be detected by AI.” In an era where facial recognition software can be used by governments for whatever purposes suit their political ends, the piece is a powerful condemnation of artists who are quick to embrace AI without stopping to question what it all means. 

“Portrait of a Collection: Selected Works from the Pinault Collection” at Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation

To continue the thread of bland offerings, there’s a middling showing of the Pinault Collection at the Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation, featuring more than 60 artists, many of whom are showing in Korea for the first time. If you’ve seen any Pinault Collection show in Europe, nothing here will surprise you, though there is an exceptional mini-survey of Miriam Cahn, who has seven paintings in the show made between 1994 and 2019. 

While bringing international art to any country’s art scene is no doubt important, that the foundation chose this show for Frieze Seoul is rather disappointing. The foundation, established by SungYeon Yoo, has since 2001 given the SongEun ArtAward, which is similar to Tate’s Turner Prize. From an open-call pool of some 500 applications, a winner is selected, who receives a cash prize of ₩20,000,000 ($15,000), the acquisition of their work for Songeun and SeMA’s permanent collections, a one-year residency program through SeMA, and the opportunity to present a solo show at Songeun within two years of winning. The pre-winner exhibition or a winning exhibition would have been a much better way to show those in town for Frieze what Korea’s young artists are up to. 

If you miss this show, there’ll always be another opportunity to see works from this esteemed blue-chip collection elsewhere in the world. But the foundation’s building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2021, is worth checking out, with a silver-foiled ceiling above the ramp that leads to the parking garage and a wood motif on the exterior that hints at Yoo’s nom de plume, Songeun, or “hidden pine tree,” which acts as a metaphor for the foundation’s mission to create a “sustainable support system” for emerging Korean artists, with the emphasis firmly on those artists, not the founder.

Elmgreen & Dragset at Amorepacific Museum of Art 

And finally, the bad.

As of late, I’ve often wondered who Elmgreen & Dragset’s work is for. I’ve concluded that it is not for me. Since their now-iconic Prada Marfa (2005) cropped up in West Texas and became a viral sensation, the artistic duo has leaned more and more into re-capturing that magic by creating works heavy on the spectacle. They’ve failed miserably at it. That’s perhaps best exemplified by the work that opens the show, a 2023 sculpture, Social Media (White Poodle), showing the titular canine on a merry-go-round with a black-and-white spiral pattern. Sure, it might make for a great Reel on Instagram, but it doesn’t say much about anything. There’s no biting social commentary, which has made me reconsider the staying power of Prada Marfa and whether it really was a commentary on just how far someone might travel for a Prada store, or if it is just another limp artwork that aides in the gentrification of a border town. The limp art continues downstairs in “Spaces,” which present five immersive installations with which the artists dot their works: a house, an empty pool, a restaurant, etc. (I must admit the woman seated at a table in the latter work did fool me for a bit; there’s an uncanniness to that work at least.) 

Per the introductory wall text, the artists “have continually redefined exhibition-making and the ways in which art can be experienced,” with this exhibition providing “the unique opportunity to uncover unexpected interpretations of everyday realities.” One, yawn; two, it doesn’t. Do yourself a favor and skip this facile show.