Frieze’s entry into Seoul in 2022 marked an inflection point for the city’s art market. Now the brand is hoping to establish a year-round presence in the South Korean capital with a permanent exhibition space whose opening will coincide with Frieze Seoul 2025.
Frieze Seoul House will closely model the structure of No. 9 Cork Street, a venue in London’s Mayfair launched by Frieze in 2021, which invites galleries from out of town to stage selling shows, providing a temporary trading platform in the UK capital. The Seoul iteration, located in a former home in the central neighbourhood of Yaksu-dong, hopes to build on this success, says Selvi May Akyildiz, the director of No. 9 Cork Street. “The model is flexible and responsive, matching the energy and appetite for art in a city. I have no doubt it will succeed in Seoul, where there have been queues around the block for exhibitions we’ve staged.”
An interior view of Frieze House Seoul Courtesy of Frieze
Patrick Lee, the director of Frieze Seoul, is similarly confident about the brand’s pull. “Frieze has gravitas in Seoul,” he says. Lee sees the purpose of the new space as two-fold. “As with No. 9, we want to connect galleries to a receptive, inbuilt audience, and to provide them with a platform to make good sales. It’s both networking and commercial.”
But Seoul is not London, and Lee hopes to distinguish the Korean venue to suit the local audience, chiefly by incorporating different artistic disciplines into the programme, staging exhibitions by architects, film-makers and fashion designers, and hosting music industry events. Koreans are also “focused on education”, he adds, and Frieze Seoul House will have a regular programme of talks and lectures. While commercial galleries will be the space’s “primary tenants”, it will also be available to hire for “curators and biennials, as well some foreign government entities” to stage non-selling shows.
A global draw
Lee envisages that galleries from Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region will be particularly interested in having a temporary base in Seoul, although he expects the cohort to be global. “Major international galleries have been opening in Seoul for several years now. This is a good way to develop a long-term relationship with the city without having to establish a permanent location, or spend the effort of finding your own pop-up space.”
Setting up shop in Seoul, Lee acknowledges, can be daunting for a foreign gallery without a Korean-speaking staff member. One benefit of Frieze Seoul House is that it can provide visiting galleries with a suite of local services, from shippers to installers, and even interns for translation. “We want to remove any worries and make the process of showing in Seoul as easy as possible,” he says.
Frieze will relocate its Seoul office to the new space, ensuring staff are on hand for visiting galleries. The building was designed in 1988, the year South Korea’s military dictatorship fell, and has been renovated by the Seoul-based studio Samuso Hyoja. It has retained many of the original domestic features, including flooring and windows. Spread across four floors, the building provides enough exhibition space for two galleries to show at the same time.
Lee is currently searching for a director to run the space, although he expects the process to take longer than a month, so he will take charge of the opening week programme. The inaugural show will consider the home and queerness as its primary themes, and feature works by around ten artists, including rising local stars such as Grim Park and Haneyl Choi.
