Frieze Seoul 2026

Beyond the Canon, Expanding the Conversation

• Presentations by artists including Do Ho Suh, Koo Jeong A, Glenn Ligon and Lee Bae coincide with major institutional exhibitions across the city  
• Spotlight debuts with renewed attention to twentieth-century artists from Korea and beyond, including Han Youngsoo, Po Po, Suk Ran Hi and Reba Hore  
• Material Practice explores new approaches to ceramics, textiles, glass, metal, wood and hanji, positioning craft as a cross-disciplinary force  
• Focus expands beyond Asia for the first time, with sixteen solo presentations conceived specifically for the fair  
• frieze magazine will launch a Korean-language quarterly in summer 2027; a sample issue, Frieze Korea, will be distributed at this year’s fair 

Seoul, South Korea — Frieze today revealed the artists and galleries to see at the fifth edition of Frieze Seoul, taking place 2–5 September at COEX, Gangnam, under the direction of Patrick Lee. Presented in partnership with Kiaf SEOUL, Frieze Seoul 2026 continues to connect the Korean art scene with the international art community, reflecting the global appetite for South Korea’s cultural landscape. 

Bringing together over 130 galleries from 30 countries and regions, this year’s edition coincides with major biennials across Korea and features ambitious solo presentations, rediscoveries of twentieth-century artists and new work spanning contemporary art, craft and design. 

Headline Partner Shinsegae Group will join Frieze Seoul for the first time, supporting the fair’s continued development and creating new opportunities for audiences to engage with art and culture. The fair continues to be supported by its Global Lead Partner Deutsche Bank, which has supported Frieze fairs for 23 consecutive years. 

Patrick Lee, Director, Frieze Seoul said: “Frieze Seoul is shaped by the extraordinary depth of activity across Korea at this time of year. At the fair, what connects this year’s edition is a shared attention to what’s been overlooked, artists whose place in the canon is still being written, craft as a serious form of contemporary practice and galleries working outside the cities that usually get noticed first. Frieze Seoul’s job is to put all of that in dialogue with the strongest, most established practices already here. The result is an edition full of discovery, both within COEX and across the city.” 

Frieze Week unfolds across the city with a citywide program of exhibitions, performances and events at leading institutions and galleries, including the Leeum Museum, SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation and Art Sonje Center. Neighborhood Nights spans Euljiro, Hannam, Cheongdam and Samcheong, connecting international visitors with Seoul’s galleries, institutions, artists and cultural communities. The program also includes Frieze LIVE: The Find Seoul, Busan Biennale × Frieze Film and Frieze Music, introducing Frieze audiences to Seoul and Korea’s wider cultural scenes.

GALLERIES: International Perspectives, Anchored in Korea

A cornerstone of Frieze Seoul since its inception, the Galleries section returns this year with leading galleries from South Korea and across the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the United States, bringing together Korean and Korean diaspora artists with major international figures and emerging voices. Strong representation comes from galleries rooted in Seoul, Busan and Daegu, alongside exhibitors from Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines and beyond.

International galleries include Axel Vervoordt Gallery, David Kordansky Gallery, Esther Schipper, Gagosian, Gladstone, Hauser & Wirth, Lehmann Maupin, Lisson, Mendes Wood DM, Mennour, Meyer Riegger Wolff, Pace Gallery, Sprüth Magers, Thaddaeus Ropac, White Cube and David Zwirner. Korean galleries featured this year include Arario Gallery, Gallery Baton, Gallery Chosun, Gallery Hyundai, Gana Art, Hakgojae Gallery, Jason Haam, Johyun Gallery, Kukje Gallery, Leeahn Gallery and PKM Gallery. Asia-Pacific galleries include Anomaly, Asia Art Center, Gajah Gallery, Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Liang Gallery, Maho Kubota Gallery, Nanzuka, Ota Fine Arts, SCAI The Bathhouse, STPI, Taka Ishii Gallery, Take Ninagawa, Tang Contemporary Art, Taro Nasu, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Tomio Koyama Gallery and What If The World. 

Highlights include:

• Damien Hirst will have a solo booth featuring iconic works from many of his most celebrated series, including Pill Cabinets, Spin Paintings, Spot Paintings, Treasures, and more, presented by Gagosian.
• Jenny Holzer‘s gold-leaf PROFORMA (2026) will anchor the presentation alongside Louise Bourgeois‘s Untitled (1998) and Lee Lozano‘s Cram (1965), with Glenn Ligon‘s first solo exhibition in Korea at APMA Cabinet, Seoul, coinciding with the fair, presented by Hauser & Wirth.
• Yoo Youngkuk‘s Work (1989) will be shown alongside James Turrell‘s newest work, an elliptical glass installation, and never-before-exhibited sculptures by Anicka Yi, coinciding with Youngkuk’s major retrospective at Seoul Museum of Art, presented by Pace Gallery.
• Korean and Korean diaspora artists across generations come together through works by Ha Chong-Hyun, pioneering sculptor Kim Yun Shin, and internationally active artists Haegue Yang, Byron Kim and Gala Porras-Kim, presented by Kukje Gallery.
• Koo Jeong A‘s SpSt Y will feature ahead of her solo exhibition at Leeum Museum this September, alongside works by the late Yun Hyong-keun (1928–2007), who features in RM x SFMOMA this October, and a new mosaic glass work by Olafur Eliasson, at PKM Gallery.
• Katherine Bernhardt‘s new works will be presented by David Zwirner, coinciding with Bernhardt’s travelling retrospective at Seongnam Arts Center’s Cube Art Museum, alongside Lucas Arruda‘s new paintings in dialogue with Giorgio Morandi.
• Kim Tschang-yeul (1929–2021), known for his meditative water-drop paintings, will feature alongside Lee Seung-taek, a pioneer of Korean avant-garde sculpture, in a dual booth at Gallery Hyundai.
• Lee Kang So will feature alongside the late Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) at Thaddaeus Ropac, coinciding with Kang So’s major solo exhibition at Lotte Museum of Art and Baselitz’s retrospective at Sehwa Museum of Art.
• Park Seo-Bo‘s Ecriture No. 221121 (2022), from his final Newspaper Écritures series, will feature alongside works by Marguerite Humeau, a nominee for the 2026 Turner Prize, and Marina Rheingantz, ahead of her first solo exhibition in Korea, presented by White Cube.
• Do Ho Suh will have a solo section of works, coinciding with his major survey exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), presented by Lehmann Maupin.
• Lee Bae will have a solo presentation of sculptural works at Johyun Gallery, coinciding with his major solo exhibition at Museum SAN, Wonju.
• Nam June Paik‘s Tolstoy (1995), inspired by his lifelong admiration for the writer’s ideas of universality and human connection, will anchor Hakgojae Gallery‘s presentation, alongside works by Lee Joon and seven Korean women artists spanning generations.
• Chase Hall‘s new paintings, exploring identity, race, history and the human condition through his distinctive use of materials such as coffee and raw cotton, commodities deeply connected to colonial exploitation, will form a solo presentation at David Kordansky Gallery.
• Eunnam Hong‘s new work Bomb (2026) will feature alongside new paintings by Laís Amaral and Josi, both participating in Gwangju Biennale’s inaugural Brazilian pavilion, and ceramics by Luiz Roque, also on view at the Busan Biennale, whose 2016 film Heaven screens as part of Frieze Film, in addition to a new sculpture by Precious Okoyomon, brought together by Mendes Wood DM.
• Clarissa Tossin and Fidencio Fifield-Perez make notable highlights at Commonwealth and Council, with Tossin’s recent body prints pairing her own body with wild vegetation gathered in Los Angeles, while Fifield-Perez makes his Seoul debut with works examining bureaucracy, identity and the personal archive.
• Kim Lim, Kimsooja, Shi Zhiying and Bosco Sodi will be featured by Axel Vervoordt Gallery, with a seminal sculpture by Lim, new works by Kimsooja from her Deductive Object and Bottari series, and new paintings by Shi Zhiying and Sodi, coinciding with Sodi’s participation in the 16th Gwangju Biennale.
• Yayoi Kusama‘s Portrait Yayoi-Chan (2014), a self-portrait that echoes Picasso‘s The Weeping Woman in its facial distortion and symbolic tears, will anchor a presentation at Ota Fine Arts.
• So Young Park‘s new performative installation, tracing the evolution of performance from Viennese Actionism to contemporary practice, will feature alongside Hermann Nitsch‘s final painting action, marking the fair’s debut of Galerie Kandlhofer.
• Hugh Hayden‘s new The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice (2026) and Anish Kapoor‘s Tangerine over Red and Spanish and Pagan Gold (2020), will feature at Lisson, alongside Dalton Paula, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Ryan Gander‘s public project The Find Seoul, unfolding across the city for Frieze LIVE.
• Moon & Jeon‘s Freedom Village_Air Lock II, imagining a future in which spring and autumn have disappeared, will feature alongside Kohei Nawa‘s colour-shifting PixCell Random at SCAI The Bathhouse.
• Yoon-Hee‘s organic sculptures, Lee Jin-Woo‘s meditative accumulations, and Lee Kang-So and Lee Kun-Yong‘s action-driven practices will feature alongside Alex Katz, Eddie Martinez, Tomokazu Matsuyama and Umar Rashid, bringing Korean and international perspectives into dialogue at Leeahn Gallery.
• Philippe Parreno‘s Iceman in Reality Park (1995–2019), a time-based sculpture that transforms as its ice figure gradually melts, will be presented by Gladstone, alongside a sculpture by Anicka Yi from her new 28-inch Akari-style kelp lamp series, The Department of Autumn Grief (2026), introducing color for the first time into a body of work traditionally defined by kelp’s natural green tone.
• STPI will also present a solo booth of works by Do Ho Suh, a selection of new thread drawings created during Suh’s 2026 residency.

SPOTLIGHT: Rewriting the Canon

Debuting this year and curated by Wonseok Koh, Director of the Line Cultural Foundation, Spotlight brings fifteen twentieth-century artists from Korea and beyond into focus, foregrounding individual histories and perspectives that have been overlooked within Western-centred accounts of twentieth-century art history.

Highlights include:

• Han Youngsoo (1933–1999)’s Everyday Futures offers a portrait of postwar Seoul that moves beyond narratives of hardship to reveal the energy and vitality of everyday life, at BAIK.
• Po Po (b. 1957)’s conceptual works, including previously unexhibited pieces from 1986–1990 made under Myanmar’s political isolation and censorship, among them his Painting for the Blind series, will feature at Ames Yavuz.
• Etsuko Nakatsuji (b. 1937)’s movement between painting and suspended installation, an early and underrecognised precursor to postwar Japanese installation art, anchors Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery‘s presentation.
• Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017)’s evolution from the CoBrA movement to a pioneering role in postwar European Informel abstraction is the focus of Die Galerie‘s booth.
• Lain Singh Bangdel (1919–2002)’s role in the emergence of modern Nepali art, and his position between South Asian and European modernist traditions, will be explored by Tansbao Gallery.
• Nobuo Sekine (1942–2019)’s Trail documents the evolution of a practice that helped shape Mono-ha and continued to develop across five decades, presented by YOD Gallery.
• Hoon Kwak (b. 1941)’s formative works from the 1970s and 80s, and their distinctive language of ritual, memory and abstraction within postwar Korean art, will be revisited at PNC Gallery.
• Jungmyung Kim (b. 1945)’s Yellow Line series, from the Korean Experimental Art movement of the late 1960s and 70s, uses humour and appropriation to expose the boundaries between civilisation and control, centring Gallery Mac‘s presentation.
• Suk Ran Hi (b. 1939)’s Nature in Painting, 1968–1995 traces her six-decade abstract practice, bringing her work into view beyond the Dansaekhwa-centred narrative of postwar Korean abstraction, at Sun Gallery.
• Gyutae Hwang (b. 1938)’s six decades of experimental photography from postwar Seoul, through to his later explorations of digital-era abstraction, will be the subject of Unaw Gallery‘s booth.
• Son Sangki (1949–1988)’s The Flowers That Never Fade revisits the Artificial City series and the artist’s unflinching yet deeply human response to Korea’s rapid industrialisation, presented by Wellside Gallery.
• Reba Hore (1927–2008)’s shift from figuration to abstraction, and her reconsideration within postwar South Asian modernism, will be explored by Art Exposure.
• Djordje Ivačković (1930–2012)’s development from the 1960s to the 1980s, and his distinctive position within postwar European abstraction, is the focus of Double Q‘s presentation.

MATERIAL PRACTICE: New Material Languages

Material Practice debuts under independent curator Hyeyoung Cho, exploring the growing cross-disciplinary exchange of contemporary art, craft and design. Supported by LG U+ and Dezeen, the section brings together artists working across ceramics, textiles, glass, metal, wood and paper, rooted in Korea’s traditions of making but extending into new material technologies and contemporary forms of expression.

Highlights include:

• Arumjigi Culture Keepers Foundation will present a spatial installation inspired by the architecture and lifestyle of the Korean hanok, reinterpreting its principles of proportion, materiality and harmony with nature through a sarangbang made with hanji and a space of hospitality featuring works by ceramic artists Kwon Dae-sup, Lee Hun-chung and Inchin Lee, and bamboo craftsman Cho Dae-yong.
• Minjae Kim, the Korean-American designer, and his mother, Seoul-based artist Myoung-Ae Lee, will be highlighted in a presentation at Marta that creates a classroom exploring the transmission of ideas and traditions across generations through art and everyday objects.
• Park Miwha‘s ceramic-based sculptures and installations, incorporating discarded and natural materials to explore renewal after disappearance, will form a solo presentation at Art Space 3, including new plant-woman ceramic works connecting botanical cycles with female existence.
• Jane Yang-D’Haene‘s ceramic works reinterpret the Korean moon jar tradition through contemporary forms, while Shin Sang-ho‘s Bird series from Structure & Force extends his exploration of movement and energy through ceramic sculpture, following his major retrospective at the MMCA Gwacheon; the two share a booth presented by Bienvenu Steinberg & C and Gallery Sklo.
• Jongjin Park and Dahye Jeong, both LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize recipients, will anchor a presentation of eight artists at Soluna Fine Art; Jeong, the first Korean winner in 2022, reinterprets traditional horsehair weaving, while Park, the 2026 winner, transforms porcelain slip-coated paper into sculptural forms.
• Kyeok Kim, Fredrik Nielsen, Heechan Kim, Peter Lane, Marc Fish, Studio Furthermore, Fabrikr and Inhye Ji will come together to explore the dialogue between artist and material through clay, glass, wood, metal and resin, at Charles Burnand Gallery.

FOCUS: The Emerging Galleries to Discover

Focus, advised for the first time by Seolhui Lee, expands beyond Asia this year into a global platform for emerging galleries founded within the last 12 years, featuring solo presentations specially conceived for the section. Focus is presented in collaboration with Stone Island, whose support, alongside Frieze’s, enables participating galleries to realise ambitious presentations. Marking the 12th fair of its partnership with Frieze, Stone Island has supported the participation of more than 130 galleries across 212 presentations globally.

Highlights include:

• Lilyjon‘s Box of Fallacy, an everyday altar that blurs witchcraft, religion and memory, will transform the entirety of Cub_ism_ Artspace‘s booth in gold, shown alongside MEET NOT SEE, a video and mixed media installation combining archival material and coloured plastic pins.
• Gabriel Massan‘s immersive installation, in which interactive gameplay on a curved 4K screen and two bronze sculptures investigate the transformation of bodies and territories within a virtual ecosystem, will feature at Yehudi Hollander-Pappi.
• dpgp78‘s installation of approximately 500 sponge block paintings, arranged across custom-built shelves and garlands, will unfold as a participatory artwork at Whistle, where a choreographed buying process invites audiences to reconsider how art is encountered and valued.
• Muyeong Kim’s new hand-coloured photographs, staged at Seodaemun Prison, a Seoul cricket house and Sorok Island’s former Hansen’s disease sanatorium, will be shown alongside new leather sculptures with N/A.
• Omyo Cho‘s debut immersive installation, in which a botanical structure of steel and glass rises from an amorphous mass at the booth’s centre, surrounded by sculptures that evoke both future organisms and remnants of deep-sea life, will premiere at Foundry Seoul.
• Yongjae Lee‘s installation, reconstructing Smithsonian-held photographs of irezumi-tattooed labourers and Emperor Gojong’s reception room, will treat gaps in the historical record as openings for invented histories rather than absences to be resolved, at Caption.
• Minhee Kim‘s new paintings, rendering the female body as a crystallised, glitch-prone cyborg surface interrupted by digital noise, will be unveiled at CON_.
• Takuya Kumagai‘s Play Sculpture, reworking fingerboard skate parks and capsule toy machines into physically playable miniature terrains that destabilise sculpture’s reliance on pedestals and monumentality, will feature at Marco Gallery.
• Ayla Tavares‘s A Dance Between Two Suns, an installation of overlapping ceramic pieces and a lantern arranged in a circular formation evoking Georges Bataille’s The Solar Anus, will unfold at Lamb.
• Reeha Lim‘s new paintings, centred on a three-panel folding screen painted on both sides of translucent silk so the image never resolves to a single viewpoint, will be shaped by the artist’s own passage between Korea, China and the United States, brought to the fair by Coulisse.
• Geoffroy Pithon‘s The Four Seasons, paintings on paper that extend beyond their frames onto the surrounding wall, developed from the artist’s large-scale immersive frescoes known as his Cabines, will feature at Maāt.
• Bekhbaatar Enkhtur‘s pewter sculptures, cast using a Mongolian ritual in which a child’s fear is read in molten metal, will anchor a solo booth at Matèria, alongside beeswax lotus forms built on modified mountaineering crampons.
• Shumu‘s new woodcuts, depicting corporeal and spectral creatures rendered through subtle gradations of monochromatic light, will resist the usual focus on the individual in favour of the relationship between subject and nature, at Linseed.
• Botond Keresztesi‘s seven new paintings, each linked to a chakra and a mineral state and paired with a sculptural frame that extends the image into physical space, will carry a recurring hourglass motif marking the passage between them, at Longtermhandstand.
• Seungean Cha‘s 0101 Weaving will draw attention to the accidental stains left on thread during warping, the preparatory stage of weaving, setting them against the deliberate order imposed once weaving begins, at Pipe Gallery.
• Johanna Seidel‘s new oil paintings, in which archetypal figures move through scenes shaped by opposing forces such as light and darkness or domestic interiors and untamed landscapes, will mark Gaa‘s first participation.

FRIEZE HOUSE SEOUL

Frieze‘s permanent gallery space for international dialogue, Frieze House Seoul, will present two exhibitions during Frieze Week, opening 27 August and running through 19 September. An opening celebration on Hannam Night, 1 September will take place at the gallery.

New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery will present WOODS LANDS MEADOWS, which brings together fourteen artists spanning the American postwar avant-garde to today, tracing how landscape is remembered, mapped and remade through memory, language and material. Featured artists include Terry Adkins, Carl Andre, Tauba Auerbach, Jennifer Bartlett, Jane Benson, Cecily Brown, Sarah Charlesworth, Mark di Suvero, Hans Haacke, Cynthia Hawkins, Sol LeWitt, Walid Raad, Veronica Ryan and Meg Webster.

Kyoto’s Yumekoubou Gallery will showcase INVISIBLE FOREST, a monumental installation by Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, composed of approximately 7,000 split bamboo strips that transform the gallery into a living environment of light and shadow, drawing a parallel between the underground mycelial networks of a forest floor and the invisible digital networks that connect contemporary life.

FRIEZE KOREA

In summer 2027, frieze magazine will expand its editorial commitment to the region with the launch of a new Korean-language quarterly devoted to contemporary art, featuring profiles, interviews and reviews of leading and emerging artists. A sample issue, titled Frieze Korea, will be distributed at this year’s editions of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf SEOUL.

PARTNER COLLABORATIONS

Shinsegae Group will present L’Immensité du Quotidien: The Monumental Everyday at the Shinsegae Lounge, featuring hundreds of works from Paul Cox‘s Diary series. Turkish Airlines will present Bosağa, a triptych by Kazakhstani artist Gulnur Mukazhanova exploring threshold, memory and cultural connection. Stone Island will support participating Focus galleries and collaborate with Yongjae Lee on a T-shirt project developed for Frieze Seoul, while LG U+ will support participating galleries in the new Material Practice section and present a large-scale installation by Erick Oh in its Frieze VIP Lounge.

FILA will present works by Sascha Nordmeyer, Keunwook Ji and Giwoong Kim as part of this year’s FILA COLORE project at Frieze Seoul. The three artists were selected through an open call responding to this year’s theme, Silver. The project will subsequently continue at Frieze House Seoul. BMW will present a lounge installation by Lee Kang So and support Frieze Music on Samcheong Night (3 September), featuring a performance by Roy Kim and a DJ set by APRO. illycaffè will present the illy Art Collection by visionary Swiss artist John Armleder, while Ruinart will continue its Conversations with Nature series with Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata. American Express will also return with a lounge inspired by the Korean jumak, reimagining the traditional wayside inn as a contemporary space for hospitality and conversation. Aman will make its Frieze Seoul debut with Madang Stillness, a VIP lounge inspired by the Korean madang and its philosophy of hospitality.

Across Frieze Week, partners will present exhibitions, installations and events throughout Seoul. LOEWE will present an exhibition by Jongjin Park, winner of the 2026 LOEWE Craft Prize, at Casa LOEWE, alongside its Cheongdam Night celebration. MCM HAUS will present Kim Chang-ok‘s Solace for You, marking MCM’s 50th anniversary through works in ottchil, the traditional Korean art of lacquer, while Cassina will present an exhibition at Cassina Store Seoul Samcheong celebrating Patricia Urquiola‘s Ardys modular sofa system. The Balvenie will also unveil a new collection conceived by Malt Master Kelsey McKechnie and interpreted by artist Daniel Arsham through an immersive performance on 1 September.

FOOD AND BEVERAGE

Frieze Seoul 2026 offers a curated food and beverage programme that reflects the city’s vibrant culinary scene. Visitors can enjoy Korean cuisine from Kyung Bok Kung by ENTAS, Jeju matcha drinks, sandwiches and vegan options from OSULLOC, and freshly made ‘nama’ doughnuts from acclaimed Japanese bakery I’m donut?

FURTHER INFORMATION

A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room will open in the week before the fair, offering audiences an advance look at presentations from participating galleries.

Frieze Seoul takes place from September 2-5, 2026