Frieze Seoul Grows Up, and Gets More Korean

The fifth edition of Frieze Seoul opened at COEX in Gangnam on Wednesday, and the most interesting number attached to it has nothing to do with money. Of the 125-plus galleries from thirty countries taking part, more than seventy per cent operate a space somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region. When the fair launched in 2022, that figure was around fifty per cent. Over fifty exhibitors this year hold a permanent address in Seoul itself.

That drift is worth pausing on, because it runs against the story usually told about international art fairs. The assumption is that a Frieze or an Art Basel lands in a new city, plants a flag, and slowly fills with the same forty or fifty global dealers who appear everywhere else. Seoul has gone the other way. Four years in, the fair looks less like a London export and more like a Korean fair with London and New York guests.

What sold, and what it tells you

The headline sale on the first day was Adrian Ghenie’s new canvas Figure with Funerary Stele, which Thaddaeus Ropac placed for €1.1 million, roughly $1.28 million. The same gallery sold an Antony Gormley cast-iron figure for £750,000, along with works by David Salle, Martha Jungwirth and Alex Katz in the low hundreds of thousands. That is a textbook blue-chip performance: known names, known prices, a fair doing what fairs are meant to do.

More telling were the Korean results sitting alongside them. Gallery Hyundai sold several works by the late Kim Tschang-yeul, whose water-drop paintings have become a kind of national shorthand, including one at $1.1 million. Kukje Gallery moved a Ha Chong-Hyun and a Park Seo-bo, both in the $250,000 to $300,000 range. Those are not consolation sales for the local trade. They are the same tier as the imported material, sold by galleries with a Seoul postcode, to a collector base that increasingly does not need a foreign dealer to make an introduction.

The mood, by most accounts, was busier than the receipts. Dealers described crowded aisles on the VIP day and then a slower, more deliberate pace of buying. That is the pattern almost everywhere in 2026: attendance holding up, conversion taking longer, collectors asking more questions before committing. Shipping and logistics costs have climbed sharply this year, and equity market volatility has done nothing for anyone’s appetite to spend six figures on a painting in a fair booth. The word doing most of the work in the trade press this week is “measured”.

Why a UK reader should care

Frieze London opens in Regent’s Park next month, and Seoul is the closest thing the calendar offers to a preview. If buyers there were cautious but present, the same is likely to be true in London, and the galleries planning their October stand budgets will be reading the Seoul reports as carefully as anyone.

But the deeper lesson is about how art markets actually mature, and it is a hopeful one for independents. Seoul’s boom years, roughly 2022 to 2024, were driven by novelty and by a rush of international attention. What has replaced that is less exciting and considerably more useful: a resident collector base, local galleries confident enough to price at international levels, and Kiaf, the Korean fair marking its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, holding its own next door rather than being flattened by the new arrival. That is what happens when a scene stops importing its credibility.

There is a version of that available to British cities outside London, and some are already partway there. A gallery quarter only becomes durable when the people who buy from it live nearby, and when the local dealers are trusted to handle serious work rather than being treated as a feeder system for somewhere else. Seoul got there in about four years, helped by a fair that chose, deliberately or not, to let the hosts take up most of the room.

A footnote with consequences

One practical change is coming. COEX is due for renovation, so next year Frieze Seoul moves to Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, a short walk from Frieze House Seoul, the year-round space the organisation opened last year. Kiaf will no longer sit under the same roof, meaning visitors will have to travel between the two.

That sounds like logistics, and mostly it is. But co-location has been the quiet engine of Seoul’s rise: the international fair and the Korean one sharing a building meant every visitor saw both, whether they meant to or not. Splitting them tests whether the local fair’s audience was ever really its own. Judging by this week’s sales, it probably was — but it is the sort of question a maturing market eventually has to answer out loud.