Frieze Seoul has announced the winner of its stand prize, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, whose work is on view at the booth of Ho Chi Minh City–based Gallery Quynh. With teal blue walls and three Alexander Calder–esque hanging mobile works, the booth immediately stands out amid many group presentations at the fair.
Each of the orange and silver sculptures is made of bomb fragments recovered from Vietnam, where the artist is based. The mobiles are activated as sound pieces, like gongs echoing through the space. These works are linked to the artist’s video piece The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), which was originally shown at James Cohan Gallery in New York.
“It wasn’t expected at all. We’re hoping this presentation shows our commitment to the artist,” said the gallery’s founder, Quynh Pham, in an interview with Artsy. She noted the visitor engagement with the work, and especially its calm themes: “We’re so thrilled that people are stopping, and that they feel like they’re in a quiet solemn space, in this frenetic art fair.” The gallerist noted that there had been significant institutional interest in the largest, central sculpture.
In the Focus Asia section, dedicated to Asia-based galleries that opened in or after 2010, Tokyo gallery Parcel won the Stand Prize for its presentation of Chinese artist LuYang. The gallery presented the artist’s animated film DOKU–The Flow (2024), which consists of nonlinear sequences in which a character, DOKU, changes in and out of different digital skins. The work’s appearance at the fair marks its debut presentation in Asia.
As the second day of the fair wound to a close today, several galleries also reported significant sales. These included:
- A 2021 painting by Nicolas Party was sold by Hauser & Wirth for $2.5 million.
- Pace Gallery sold a 1988 painting by Lee Ufan priced at $1.2 million, an Adam Pendleton painting priced at $275,000, and a Lee Kun-Yong painting priced at $250,000.
- White Cube sold a work by Mona Hatoum for £150,000 ($197,634) and a Marina Rheingatz painting for $120,000.
- Thaddaeus Ropac sold Lee Bul’s Perdu CXIII (2021) for $190,000.
- Axel Vervoordt Gallery sold two works by Raimund Girke for €65,000 ($72,145) and $66,000 apiece.
