Galleries Report Uneven Sales at Frieze Seoul, With Success at the Top and Low Ends of the Market
The fourth edition of Frieze Seoul opened Wednesday to strong collector turnout and solid first-day sales despite a global market still in a turbulent phase.
“The audience here is a good one—quantitatively very strong,” Frieze Seoul director Patrick Lee told ARTnews. MoMA PS1 director Connie Butler and Wassan Al-Khudhairi, a cocurator of the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025, were on hand on opening day, as were Lonti Ebers, Yassmin Ghandehari, and Qiao Zhibing, all regulars on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. Rounding out these high-profile attendees were K-pop stars such as Lisa (of BLACKPINK), RM (of BTS), and The8 and Vernon (of Seventeen).
Although the initial buzz of Frieze’s Seoul launch has cooled and the broader market is slowing, international blue-chip galleries with spaces in the city are doubling down, using the moment to present top-tier shows of their star artists. Among them are Pace Gallery, with a showing of five recent installations by James Turrell, including a site-specific work titled Wedgework, as well as an Anthony Gormley double header at White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac.
Korea’s private museums have also put on blockbusters, like those for Mark Bradford at the Amorepacific Museum of Art and Lee Bul at Leeum Museum, both of which drew large crowds earlier in the week. (Gormley is also unveiling this week a new permanent installation at the Tadao Ando–designed Museum SAN, about two hours outside the capital.)
This alignment seems to have spurred some buying at Frieze. By the end of the first day, Hauser & Wirth sold Bradford’s triptych Okay, then I apologize (2025) for $4.5 million and a Lee Bul sculpture for $400,000 and a Lee painting for $300,000, all of which went to collections in Asia. White Cube sold a Gormley sculpture for £250,000, while Ropac sold a Gormley work on paper for £25,000.
“As a UK-founded gallery, we want to introduce more international artists to Korean audiences,” Wendy Xu, the managing director of White Cube’s Asia operations, told ARTnews, noting that “the anticipation from local audiences this year” and the surge of traffic were unlike previous editions, with this year’s Seoul Art Week seeming more international than past years.
Beyond its Bradford and Lee sales, Hauser & Wirth also reported that George Condo’s Purple Sunshine (2025) went for $1.2 million, a Rashid Johnson for $750,000, an Avery Singer painting for $475,000, and an Angel Otero painting for $285,000. Ropac sold Georg Baselitz’s 2019 painting Es ist dunkel, es ist for €1,800,000 and an Alex Katz painting for $900,000. White Cube also sold a Baselitz—Erstens, bitte schön (2014) for €1.3 million—as well as a Tracey Emin bronze for £220,000.
While Pace didn’t have any works by Turrell on offer in its booth, the mega-gallery sold a number of works on opening day, including a 2025 Mary Corse painting for $225,000, Robert Indiana’s 1972–2000 sculpture ART (Red Blue) for $195,000, a 2024 Robert Nava painting for $185,000, and a 2025 Pam Evelyn painting for $85,000.
Other notable sales included Kim Whanki’s Cloud and the Moon (1962) going for ₩2 billion (about $1.4 million) at Seoul’s Hakgojae Gallery. Sprüth Magers sold two Barbara Kruger works for $500,000 and $100,000. Lisson Gallery sold a Hiroshi Sugimoto for $250,000 and two works by Leiko Ikemura for €140,000 and €70,000. Gallery Hyundai reported sales of a Chung Sang-Hwa work at around $600,000 and a John Pai piece at around $300,000.
Kukje Gallery sold 15 works, including several in the six-figure range, like a Jenny Holzer (in the range of $400,000–$480,000), a painting by Ha Chong-Hyun ($230,000–$276,000), and two fabric works by Louise Bourgeois ($100,000–$120,000 each). David Zwirner reported sales of new work by Katherine Bernhardt, Huma Bhabha, Oscar Murillo and Walter Price, but did not disclose prices.
Lehmann Maupin placed several works, including Allegory (2025), a beaded canvas by Liza Lou in the $240,000–260,000 range, and Hernan Bas’s 2025 painting The biased audience (watching the dog show) for $225,000. “The art scene in Seoul is finally reawakening after a period of uncertainty,” Emma Son, the gallery’s Seoul-based partner, said in a statement. “As a result, the art world has started to wake up to the amazing talent, both established and emerging, coming out of Korea.”
Sojung Kang, director of the homegrown heavyweight Arario Gallery, pointed out that while the economy is slowing, it isn’t collapsing, as Korean collectors are still buying, especially if the work on offer is strong.
But the market isn’t booming across the board. Some 40 galleries didn’t return to this year’s edition and the big-ticket sales by mega-galleries reinforced what many insiders say about Korea: collectors still favor traditional mediums, like painting and sculpture, and established, blue-chip names, even as the country’s museums embrace more experimental practices.
“Korean collectors are still privileging established artists or gallery names,” said dealer Jessica Silverman, whose eponymous gallery is participating in the fair for the third year. For this edition, she shifted her strategy, mounting a group presentation instead of a solo booth to test collectors’ preferences and widen the chances of closing sales. While many showed strong interest in Davina Semo’s bronze bell installation, she told ARTnews she was not satisfied with how sales had progressed by the end of the first day.
Lucien Tso, founder of Shanghai’s Gallery Vacancy, echoed similar frustrations. The gallery, which has participated since Frieze Seoul’s first edition, has found sales in Korea consistently lukewarm. Even still, he cautioned, “you have to keep trying to expand your collector base somewhere. You can’t always rely on the old ones.”
For some younger galleries, early success seemed to turn quickly. Linseed, a Shanghai-based first-time exhibitor, reported selling most of its solo booth of Liang Lu paintings—priced between $6,500 and $34,000—on the fair’s opening day. But by the second day, a Korean collector had canceled the gallery’s largest purchase. “A lot of collectors here are very curious,” Zhuang Lingzhi, Linseed’s founder, told ARTnews. “We might need to better understand how they operate. For small galleries from elsewhere in Asia, the biggest hurdles often come down to language barriers and different ways of doing business.”
Toward the end of the first day, Lee, the fair’s director, still remained optimistic about the fair’s role in the local market, pointing to the country’s long history of collecting and strong governmental support for the arts. This year alone, the Korean government distributed 2.1 million discount vouchers for performances and exhibitions as part of a push to stimulate the economy and broaden access to culture.
“If we can get even a portion of those people who engaged in those sort of transactional things to support artists and to buy from the galleries, that will be a great thing,” said Lee.
Joon Soo Yeo, director of Seoul-based Gallery Chosun, said that while Frieze has helped raised the international profile of Korea’s art market, what he thinks is still a missing component is support for very emerging artists. Because their works carry such low margins, blue-chip and mid-size galleries are typically less eager to take them on, and smaller spaces, particularly from Korea and elsewhere in the region, often can’t afford to participate in Frieze or KIAF.
“If the Korean art industry could inspire the same level of success as K-pop, then there’s a real chance for it to grow,” he said. On the first day of the fair, he noticed strong interest from international collectors in very young Korean artists but added there’s still no clear pathway to connect the two sides.
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