Best Booths at Frieze Seoul 2025

SAC Gallery made a bold curatorial statement by dedicating its entire booth to Thai artist and filmmaker Prapat Jiwarangsan. The presentation, titled “The Portrait of Asian Family,” marks the gallery’s progression from showcasing emerging talent to a committed investments in established artists. On view are three video works that explore the complex dynamics of contemporary Asian identity via examinations family structures, cultural expectations, and generational shifts. Jiwarangsan’s cinematic background is evident in his approach to narrative-driven pieces like Parasite Family (2021–23), where he traces the evolution of family roles across different cultural contexts.

The Frieze Seoul debut of hometown outfit Sun Gallery was a talking point in Korean gallery circles on opening day, largely because its owner, Lee Sunghoon, is the current president of the Galleries Association of Korea, which organizes the concurrent KIAF fair downstairs. The gallery’s Frieze Masters presentation of Chungji Lee’s “MURUE” series, from the 1990s, brings new attention to Korea’s only female Dansaekhwa painter, who has contributions have long been overshadowed despite having work in the permanent collections of the country’s top museum. The “MURUE” works—a portmanteau of the French words mur (wall) and rue (street)—feature Lee’s signature process of covering canvas with rollers, then scraping them with knives to create textured, monochromatic surfaces.

The most eye-catching installation at Arario Gallery’s 13-artist booth resembles a kaiju movie set, complete with oversize creatures and cinematic debris. This theatrical environment is the work of Don Sunpil, who has transformed anime figurine culture into immersive sculpture that challenges the boundaries of high and low art. Don’s installation features hybrid objects and deliberately imperfect reproductions drawn from tokusatsu special effects and bishōjo figurines, creating sculptures that explore the tension between mass production and individual craftsmanship.

In the Focus Asia section, which showcases emerging galleries from across the region, Tokyo’s CON_ delivers a presentation that literally stops visitors in their tracks—not just catching their eyes but catching their feet. Taiki Yokote’s Floating Rubble (when the cat’s away, the mice will play), from 2022–25, features concrete fragments from the artist’s demolished studio spinning mid-air through magnetic force, while trash bags spill beyond the booth’s boundaries into the fair’s walkways. The 26-year-old sculptor represents a rising generation of Japanese artists who came of age during the shift from mass media to digital saturation, channeling this uncanny everyday experience into kinetic installations that defy both gravity and convention. Yokote’s salvaged building materials—resin-cast rubble, twisted steel wires, floating debris—each receive pet names like Po and Ten, reflecting his affectionate relationship with discarded matter.

Among the works at Tokyo-based gallery A Lighthouse Called Kanata’s booth, Hisao Domoto’s Untitled (1966) stands out for its thickly applied bands of black paint that sit atop a layer of striking red paint. That work contrast sharply with Satoru Ozaki’s can i see you (2024), a circular stainless-steel sculpture that resembles the opening of void. On the fair’s opening day, the work, by an artist whom the gallery considers “one of the forgotten and lost treasures of Japan,” was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

It’s hard to walk past Istanbul gallery Dirimart’s booth without being a bit confused. The booth appears to contain nothing—or rather, floating in mid-air are replicas scaled to half the booth’s size and half of that half-size. This is Ayşe Erkmen’s Half of (2025), a site-specific installation that creates a booth within booth within booth effect. “We took a risk,” gallery manager Dilara Altuğ told ARTnews, noting that the gallery is banking on visitors’ curiosity to discover the layered spatial intervention suspended within their 527-square-foot space. The delicate maquettes made of Japanese shoji paper and wooden constructions build on Erkmen’s decades-long practice of repositioning existing structures, rather than creating new objects.

The collaboration between Beijing’s Antenna Space and Los Angeles’s Commonwealth & Council highlights how galleries can use resource-sharing strategies in face of a challenging market. The works on view, from each gallery’s roster, blend seamlessly together: Lotus L. Kang’s 2024–25 Molt (Woodridge–Basel–Seoul), with its draped sheets of tanned photo paper suspended like transforming bodies, pairs with Shuang Li’s Our Lady of Sorrows (2024), a sleek assemblage made of resin, fabric, print on vinyl, found objects.

In the Masters section, Hakgojae Gallery’s presentation centers around the theme of the Korean Mother, anchoring nine pioneering Korean artists around an 18th-century Moon Jar. Here, faces emerge as the unifying motif—from Park Soo Keun’s stoic postwar women to Pen Varlen’s Mother (1985), painted the year he turned the age at which his mother had died. Varlen’s thick impasto layers capture profound longing, while the Moon Jar’s gentle asymmetry—formed by joining two hemispheres—provides both aesthetic anchor and philosophical framework.

In the early days of Frieze Seoul, it seemed like institutions were being dragged along by the fair. Now that dynamic has flipped, noted a curator colleague encountered at the fair, and nowhere is this reversal more evident than at Hauser & Wirth’s booth. Mark Bradford’s monumental triptych Okay, then I apologize (2025), which sold on on the first day for $4.5 million to an Asian collector, serves as both a commercial centerpiece and strategic complement to the artist’s concurrent solo exhibition at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. This synchronicity between fair and institutional programming reflects the evolving relationship between galleries and cultural institutions. Two other gallery artists—Louise Bourgeois at Hoam Museum and Lee Bul at Leeum Museum—also have exhibitions on view this week; Hauser & Wirth’s $8 million first-day sales total seems to reflect not mere commercial success but integrated programming.

At Frieze Seoul, Pace demonstrates why mega-galleries remain mega: they preview the future while historicizing the present. Various strains of abstraction are on view, representing a global continuum, with highlights including Adolph Gottlieb’s monumental Expanding (1962), at the booth’s center, and Yoo Youngkuk’s Water (1979), which is being shown publicly for the first time. These masters’ works are paired with artists generations younger, like Friedrich Kunath and Lauren Quin, both of whom recently signed to the gallery. But with its focus on the historical, Pace’s booth is a reminder that in uncertain times institutional gravitas still sells.