Seoul Art Week 2026 sees galleries change tactics to woo buyers in a cooler market

Frieze Seoul’s fifth edition opened in a subdued art market, where prolonged uncertainty has made collectors more cautious and galleries more attentive to affordability. Held from September 2 to 5 at the Coex centre in Gangnam, the fair introduced new sections aimed at attracting buyers in a more austere market.
Patrick Lee, director of Frieze Seoul, said the slowdown in the art market had been protracted, with established collectors taking a more measured approach amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty. He also noted that the influence of younger buyers had often been overstated.
“There was a spurt of speculators, crypto investors and the like who generated a lot of activity during the pandemic,” he said. “And then they realised they couldn’t sell art like shares in the stock market.”
Even so, he said, the four-day fair had attracted a curious and engaged new generation of collectors. Galleries, he added, had responded by diversifying their offerings and introducing more accessible entry points.
The Korea International Art Fair (Kiaf) took place from September 2 to 6 on a different level of the same building as Frieze, with the two events sharing entry passes.
With more than 300 galleries presenting across the two events, Seoul once again hosted Asia’s second-largest art fair week, after Hong Kong’s Art Basel week. Seoul’s fairs, however, remain less international in terms of gallery participation, with most exhibitors from Korea or the wider region.
“The Korean market reached its highest volume in 2022 at around 1 trillion won [US$800 million], but by 2024, it had fallen 40 per cent to about 600 billion won,” said Lee Sung-hoon, president of the Galleries Association of Korea, which runs Kiaf. But like Patrick Lee, he said there were now signs that the market was returning to a more sustainable path.
“The [hot] money receded, the speculators disappeared from the market, and real collectors remained,” Lee Sung-hoon said.
The range of works sold on the first day of Frieze Seoul illustrated galleries’ need to cater to buyers with divergent budgets.
White Cube’s opening-day sales included two works from Park Seo-bo’s “Ecriture” series, priced at US$300,000 and US$190,000, as well as a watercolour by Yoko Matsumoto at US$5,500. Thaddaeus Ropac sold Adrian Ghenie’s Figure with Funerary Stele for €1.1 million (US$1.3 million), alongside three paintings by young Korean artist Heemin Chung, priced between US$24,000 and US$33,000.
Frieze Seoul’s new “Material Practice” section explored the intersections between art, craft and design. It featured Hong Kong gallery Soluna, which sold three porcelain works by Loewe Craft Prize 2026 winner Park Jong-jin for between US$6,000 and US$40,000. The gallery also sold two of Seungtaik Jang’s paintings on Plexiglas, each priced at between US$10,000 and US$15,000.
Kyoto’s Yumekoubou Gallery brought bamboo master Tanabe Chikuunsai IV to Seoul. At the Frieze House art space, he wove a room-sized bamboo installation that withstood crowds of selfie-takers. A mini version, measuring two metres (6.5ft) across, was offered at the fair for US$69,300.
Galleries also faced sharply higher shipping costs amid the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
A heavily promoted exhibition of Gagosian artist Jonas Wood at Seoul’s Amorepacific Museum of Art was cancelled at the last minute because of the crisis. The museum instead assembled a large Sol LeWitt show in just one month, drawing on loans from across Asia and works that could be executed on site according to instructions.
At the fairs, smaller galleries generally had less room to absorb disappointing sales.
Fortunately for Hong Kong’s Double Q Gallery, the results of its first overseas fair exceeded expectations, according to co-owner Nick Chu. The gallery presented Serbian-French artist Djordje Ivackovic in the new “Spotlight” section, which was dedicated to solo presentations of overlooked 20th century artists.
Chu said the works’ relatively accessible price range, from HK$50,000 to HK$150,000 (US$6,400 to US$19,100), helped attract buyers in the current market. Even if the costly participation did not generate a profit, he and co-founder Queenie Rosita Law regarded the fair as an investment in their longer-term efforts to promote Central European artists.
Demand from museums and foundations in South Korea and the wider region remained strong at the top end of the market, said Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth. Transactions were taking longer, he said, but South Korea’s strong institutional bases continued to grow their ambitious, world-class collections.
Works by Do Ho Suh were everywhere. The South Korea-born artist had a solo booth at Lehmann Maupin, works on display at STPI’s booth at Frieze Seoul, and a 500-work retrospective at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Hong Kong’s M+ in 2027.
Georg Baselitz, who died this April aged 88, also loomed large. The German painter’s first posthumous retrospective in Asia opened at Seoul’s Sehwa Museum of Art, while Thaddaeus Ropac’s Seoul space presented his recent “Shadow” series.
The gallery scene continued to grow at a “slow and steady” pace, Patrick Lee said. Although several galleries have closed recently, Gladstone Gallery has expanded its Seoul space, and Meyer Riegger has just established a Seoul presence jointly with Galerie Jocelyn Wolff.
Hong Kong-based Pavilion also held the first edition of its art fair in Seoul during Frieze week, in a grungy, semi-open setting intended to further lower the barriers to buying art.
Next year, Frieze Seoul will move from Coex to the Zaha Hadid-designed Dongdaemun Design Plaza. Design Miami Seoul held its second edition at the venue during the same week as the art fairs, underscoring the overlap between audiences for contemporary art and collectible design.