Prada Mode, Private Art Club, Heads South Korea in Time for Frieze Seoul

 Prada Mode, a social club concept created to provide members with art programming, music performances and dining, will head to South Korea to host its 10th iteration, titled “Plural and Parallel,” at the cultural venue KOTE on Sept. 5 and 6.

The event will coincide with the second edition of Frieze Seoul, which runs from Sept. 6 to 9 at COEX in the Gangnam district.

Under the curation of Lee SookKyung, director of the Whitworth art gallery at the University of Manchester since June, Prada Mode Seoul will highlight the nation’s achievement in filmmaking with installations by three directors shown across KOTE’s different buildings.

Their cinematic visions will come to life via conversations with Lee around culinary culture, absence and mortality. The two-day event will also include screenings, musical performances and conversations, as well as glocal culinary offerings.

“Films impact cultures by reflecting the values and ideas that already exist in a given culture but also by opening up new possibilities and visions. What we see in films are both reflections of realities and promises of imagined worlds, a product and prompt of the collective imagination,” Lee said.

She added that the three directors “create distinctive worlds in their films that are at once products of contemporary South Korea and inspirations for different possibilities,” and Prada Mode Seoul aims to highlight their “uniquely diverse visions by providing three separate yet interconnected spaces, each representing the individual director’s version of actual and imagined reality.”

A seasoned and respected contemporary art curator, Lee launched her career at Tate Liverpool. She then worked as senior curator of international art at Tate Modern. In 2015, she was appointed the commissioner and curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Lee also served as the artistic director of the 14th Gwangju Biennale and was recently hired as the curator of the Japan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

Prior to Seoul, Prada Mode traveled to Tokyo for its ninth iteration, which was hosted and curated by award-winning architect and longtime Prada collaborator Kazuyo Sejima, the director of the Teien Art Museum. Prada Mode Tokyo included music performances, conversations, a tea ceremony and original workshops, among other activities.

Last November, Prada Mode headed to Dubai with a reprise of Damien Hirst’s “Pharmacy” installation at the ICD Brookfield Place, a skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners in the heart of the city’s International Financial Centre.

Prada Mode was launched during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018, as an evolution of the Prada Double Club by artist Carsten Höller. The following year, the format touched down at Art Basel Hong Kong and Frieze London, while in 2020 Prada brought the concept to Paris and to Shanghai, where the brand invited producer, director and writer Jia Zhangke to transform the Prada Rong Zhai with a site-specific installation called Miàn based on his cinematic work.

In 2021, the COVID-19-disrupted edition in Moscow was held in December, while in February 2022 the format went to Los Angeles during Frieze featuring a collaboration with artist Marine Syms.