How KIAF’s 2023 Edition Showcases Seoul’s Evolving Art World Clout

The Korean art world was out in full force during the VIP day of the Korean International Art Fair (KIAF), where aisles and booths were bustling throughout.

Taking place in the upscale district of Gangnam-gu, south of the Han River, KIAF shares the vast COEX Center with Frieze Seoul, which also had its VIP day on Wednesday. The combined heft of these two events has created a major art world moment that sprawls across the Korean capital: Gallery nights, museum openings, and glitzy parties (some attended by K-pop stars) are all rife over the course of this packed week, in which FOMO abounds and diaries overflow.

“You see a lot of Korean artists who are really showing their presence everywhere,” said Jasmin Park, an international partner at Atelier AKI, which is based in Seoul. “It’s great to see that we are becoming an international market.”

The gallery, which was founded in 2010, has been a regular participant at KIAF, making it well placed to watch the evolution of the fair in the context of the local market. Its booth at KIAF presented a varied and lively selection of works from a number of ultra-contemporary Korean artists including Yoon Sangyoon, Chae Jimin, and Chung SooYoung. Like many gallerists Artsy spoke to over the course of the VIP day, Park noted the prominence of younger collectors throughout Seoul Art Week.

“It’s nice to see that it’s not just the older generations who are interested in the arts, [but] really people in their twenties and thirties are also [showing] a lot of interest,” Park said. “It’s a very booming and popping time.”

While Frieze Seoul only hosted its inaugural edition last year, KIAF is Korea’s oldest art fair and held its first edition in 2002. Much like the Korean art scene as a whole, the fair has continued to bloom into maturity in recent years. For example, the fair has expanded from 164 galleries at last year’s edition to 210 this year, representing some 19 countries and territories worldwide. More than 130 galleries are from Korea, offering a panoramic view of the country’s burgeoning contemporary art milieu.

As such, the sheer size of the fair—which can almost catch the visitor off-guard—also means that the range of art on view is broad in scope, scale, and price point. As well as heavyweight blue-chip names such as Damien Hirst and Lee Ufan, there are plenty of new gems to be discovered, particularly from international galleries bringing their homegrown talent to an Asian audience, and regional galleries presenting their emerging artists on this expansive, increasingly international stage.

“Everyone’s really excited for more people to come in, and we’re hoping for more of an international audience,” said Seunghee Chung, director at Seoul-based Dohing Art, which is presenting a solo booth of playful paintings by Minyoung Kim. The gallery, which focuses on younger Korean ultra-contemporary artists, views the fair as an extension of its mission. “Part of the focus of coming to KIAF is to try and uplift Korean artists as well as to show them to the rest of the world.”

More than 30 galleries at this year’s edition are also making their KIAF debuts. These include tastemaking New York galleries such as The Hole and Denny Gallery; trendy European names including Galerie Marguo from Paris and Galerie Thomas from Munich; and notable regional players like Lucie Chang Fine Arts from Hong Kong and SPACE Willing N Dealing from Seoul.

Many of these debutants include younger international galleries that are new to art fairs as a whole. Among these is Antwerp gallery Newchild, for whom KIAF is its fourth fair. Its booth is dedicated to a solo show debut of Brooklyn-based painter Madeleine Bialke, who presents a series of meditative canvases drawn from the artist’s memories of her parent’s farm in Trumansburg, New York. “It’s exciting for us to be in this part of the world,” said Chandler Noah, a director at the gallery, which was founded in 2020. “There’s a lot of interest and a lot of collectors that we’ve sold to [here] that we’ve not actually been able to meet [until now].”

In the first hours of the VIP day, the young gallery had already experienced strong interest from local collectors for the artist, who is making her solo show debut in Asia. “There’s very much a collecting mentality, and they take their time to really get to know the body of work,” said Sarah Vanwelden, another director at the gallery. “It’s really nice to sort of very considerate approach to buying art.”

Similarly, Biscuit Gallery, which was founded in 2021 in Tokyo, chose KIAF as its first international art fair due to the “energy and excitement” of the Korean art scene, said its CEO Mahiko Kobayashi. Its standout booth in the Plus section of the fair dedicated to emerging galleries displays work by three of its represented artists, Sawako Nasu, Yurina Okada, and Yosuke Yamanouchi, who are all making their international debuts at the fair. In particular, Nasu’s haunting paintings of ambiguous figures and landscapes are a fair highlight.

Elsewhere in the Plus section is another standout booth from London’s Cob, which presents work by three artists born after 1990: Diane Chappalley, Larissa Lockshin, and YaYa Yajie Liang—the latter’s expansive, biomorphic paintings look as though they are shifting in front of the viewer. “Her work is very much about the interconnectivity of all living things,” said Kat Sapera, who curated a solo show of the artist at the gallery this summer. “[They are] an engagement with animality, looking at this human connection with the natural world in the wake of a human-induced climate crisis.”