7 Highlights from Frieze Seoul
Back for it's fourth edition, this year's fair showcased 121 exhibitors from 28 countries
Returning to the COEX center in the upscale Gangnam neighborhood from September 3-6, the fourth edition of Frieze Seoul showcased 121 exhibitors from 28 countries and attracted 70,000 visitors, including representatives from over 160 leading museums and institutions.
Scheduled alongside major museum exhibitions, including Lee Bul’s dynamic survey show at the Leeum Museum of Art and the opening of Frieze House Seoul—a dedicated space for year-round exhibitions and cross-cultural exchange—the fair also highlighted the city’s main gallery districts with openings and events, offering visitors the chance to explore Seoul’s captivating art, architecture, and cuisine.
“Now in its fourth edition, Frieze Seoul has once again confirmed Seoul’s potential as a new art hub in Asia,” shared Hyun-Sook Lee, founder and chairwoman of Kukje Gallery. “Despite concerns over the global economic downturn and instability, collectors, curators, art professionals, and enthusiasts from Asia, the United States, and Europe—as well as a wide range of Korean visitors—came to the fair, galleries, and museums, turning the entire city into a remarkable celebration of art.”
Scroll through to discover our favorite artworks from Frieze Seoul 2025.
1. Lee Bul | Hauser & Wirth
A celebrated Korean artist, Lee Bul works across multiple disciplines to explore themes such as utopian ideals, technological change, and the fragile nature of human ambition. With a touring survey at the city’s Leeum Museum of Art, Hauser & Wirth showcased key paintings and sculptures by the Seoul-based artist in its group show booth. A striking, suspended sculpture made of metal, mirrors, and wood, her “Untitled Sculpture (W6-1)” (2010) employs architectural elements to examine the lasting themes of utopian modernity and the rise and fall of progressive projects. Related to Bul’s popular Sternbau series, which was inspired by the architectural fantasies of the German architect Bruno Taut, it expresses the utopian desire to achieve perfection through technological advances and the dystopian fears and failures that often follow.
2. Ugo Rondinone | Gladstone
A popular artist in South Korea, Ugo Rondinone is widely recognized for his meditations on nature and the human condition. Using an organic formal vocabulary that blends various sculptural and painterly traditions, the New York-based artist poetically explores his Swiss heritage to create peaceful paintings, stony sculptures, and introspective installations, videos, and performances. The centerpiece of the gallery’s booth, amusingly titled dritteraugustzweitausendfünfundzwanzig (third of August two-thousand -twenty-five) (2025) is a watercolor on canvas that captures a multi-color mountain lake landscape inspired by Lake Lucerne, where Rondinone spent his childhood. Large in scale, it complements a series of smaller paintings of the same reflective subject matter at Gladstone’s intimate Seoul gallery space.
3. Michelangelo Pistoletto | Mazzoleni
A key participant in New York’s Pop art scene and a pioneer of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in 1933 in a small town in Italy, where he still lives and works. He is best known for his fascinating figurative paintings on mirrors, which harness everyday materials while engaging the viewer in the artwork. He created his first painted mirror piece in 1962 and continues to produce captivating silkscreen on stainless steel works, like Smartphone – donna in piedi e donna seduta (Smartphone – standing woman, sitting woman) (2018), today. Portraying two women looking at their smartphones rather than talking to each other, the conceptual portrait captures the zeitgeist, showing that, at age 92, Pistoletto still has his finger on the pulse of the current moment.
4. Jenny Holzer | Kukje Gallery
Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual and installation artist whose work uses text in public spaces across various media, including electronic signs, carved stone, paintings, billboards, and printed materials. Trained as a painter, she gained her international reputation through her provocative use of language, but has since gone back to her original medium in response to unlawful government actions. Resembling modernist classics by artists like Mark Rothko and Kazimir Malevich, her Redaction Paintings are based on declassified U.S. government documents that reveal abuse of power. Her painting chimes (2025) appropriates a document with the word “secret” crossed out, while the rest of the content is covered with bands of 24k gold, palladium, and platinum leaf, transforming dirty deeds into strips of precious metals that resemble a peaceful chime and suggest a darker conversation.
5. Park Seo-Bo | LG OLED
An influential Korean abstract painter and a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Dansaekhwa monochrome movement, Park Seo-Bo initially embraced Art Informel, a European style of abstraction in the 1950s. However, he later moved away from it as he searched for a painting style that better reflected his beliefs and cultural background. Honored at the LG OLED Lounge, paintings from the late artist’s seminal Ecriture series, which features colors inspired by nature, were displayed alongside digital interpretations of his vibrantly painted Hanji paper on canvas monochromes. The vibrant autumn maple leaf color, vividly captured in Ecriture No.100711 (2010), marked the beginning of his fascination with nature’s hues and his deeper exploration of color.
6. Karen Kilimnik | Galerie Eva Presenhuber
As part of a small group of artists who revived realistic figurative painting in the early 1990s, Karen Kilimnik explores the worlds of fashion and fairy tales, ballet, and film, as well as witchcraft and royalty, all while visually examining romantic traditions and the influence of consumer culture. Depicting a faceless female figure sitting on a tree as if on a throne, the Philadelphia-born and based artist’s painting the Witch appearing in the garden (2011/2019) exudes confidence from the subject—whose fallen hat mischievously rests on the ground below and her heels seem ready to be kicked into the air—as well as from the layered pencil and paint from Kilimnik’s hand.
7. Leiko Ikemura | Lisson Gallery
Leiko Ikemura, a Japanese-Swiss painter and sculptor living and working in Cologne and Berlin where she also teaches, is best known for her evolving style that incorporates elements of symbolism, expressionism, and magical worlds. Inspired by mythology, East Asian painting traditions, Surrealism, post-war abstraction, and mysticism, she creates spiritual works referencing animals, humans, and plants. Fresh off a solo show at one of Lisson’s New York spaces, the gallery displayed several expressive paintings and sculptures, including Aware (2017/2024), a patinated bronze in the shape of a melon with protruding sprouts that resemble happy talking heads.