Art And Seoul

With a booming gallery scene, a roster of home-grown talent and its first Frieze, the South Korean capital is poised to become the art world’s new It city.

- Julie Belcove

WHEN FRIEZE ALIGHTED in Seoul last month for the first time, the hip international art fair’s imprimatur officially anointed the buzzy Asian city as the next great global art centre.

But the cognoscenti have been onto Seoul for a while. Gallery Hyundai, the country’s oldest contemporary-art specialist, has been operating since 1970, while South Korea’s own Gwangju Biennale has risen above other upstart festivals since its 1995 debut. Western galleries, including Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Pace, began opening in Seoul five or six years ago, but in the lead-up to Frieze’s debut, the scene had exploded: Thaddaeus Ropac, Gladstone and König all moved in over the past year or so; Pace expanded from two floors to three last spring and added a sculpture courtyard and teahouse in time for Frieze; and Perrotin opened a second space in late August, on the eve of the fair. Even relative newcomers such as Various Small Fires, founded in Los Angeles only 10 years ago, have laid down roots in the city.

“It’s made a huge step,” Ropac says of Seoul’s status, describing its cultural infrastructure as “almost unparalleled in Asia”. Noting that it takes more than size or wealth to emerge as an art capital, Ropac lists artists, art schools, museums, curators, collectors, critics and writers as essential elements. “The art world demands a big infrastructure. Many places that arrive on the scene now, they sometimes have one of these tools – you know, like cheap studios or great collectors. Hong Kong has some very good collectors, a few institutions (but) barely any artists. You need so many things to make an art world really thriving, and Seoul developed it.”