Installation view, Suh Se Ok X LG OLED Reimagined by Suh Do Ho, Shaped by Suh Eul Ho, Frieze Seoul 2024.
Photo: Courtesy of LG OLED
9 Standout Artworks from Frieze Seoul, the Gwangju Biennale, and Kiaf SEOUL
The art world descended upon South Korea last week for the opening of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf SEOUL (both September 4-8) at the supersized Convention and Exhibition Center (COEX) in the city’s lively Gangnam district and the 15th Gwangju Biennale (September 7– December 1) at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and various venues across the country’s southwestern city. Below are the standout artists who should be on every collector’s list.
Jason Boyd Kinsella, Justine, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
1. Jason Boyd Kinsella at Perrotin, Frieze Seoul
A Toronto-born artist living between and working Oslo and Los Angeles, Jason Boyd Kinsela makes geometric paintings and sculptures of people based on their traits from the Myers-Briggs personality test. The subject of an arresting solo show at Perrotin in Seoul, he exhibited two paintings and a sculpture at the fair. His painting Justine captures the sitter’s psychological makeup through a variety of colorful, shaded, intersecting forms. Strikingly painted in an Old Master style, the remarkable result is an abstract portrait of a person realistically rendered.
Nell, The ghost who walks will never die (sunshine #4), 2024. Photo: Courtesy Station.
2. Nell at Station, Frieze Seoul
A multidisciplinary Australian artist working in diverse media with an assortment of materials, Nell creates playful, poetic, and skillfully crafted artworks. Widely exhibited across Australia over the past 30 years, the Sydney-based artist is celebrated for using symbolic motifs, such as smiley faces, ghosts, eggs, teardrops, lightning bolts, and crosses. At Station’s group show booth, Nell exhibited hand-blown glass ghost heads depicted with wide-open eyes and mouths on vibrant, transparent, draped sheet-like forms. Tiny versions were hung on forged stainless-steel branches, which looked natural, while her more prominent glass ghosts sat hauntingly still atop plinths.
Amanda Baldwin, Bending The Bay, 2024. Photo: Courtesy Jason Haam.
3. Amanda Baldwin at Jason Haam, Frieze Seoul
A Seattle-born, Brooklyn-based artist, Amanda Baldwin began her pursuit as a painter by making semi-abstract still lives before adding larger-scaled landscapes to her oeuvre. Constructing long-distance views through forests and mountainous ranges to far-off horizons, she creates dreamlike scenarios, where trees and hills have been reduced to colorful, abstract forms. Her painting Bending the Bay at Jason Haam’s booth at the fair depicts an open vista between tall trees of a river winding through mountains toward a gorgeous, clouded sunset. By abstracting and layering the realistic forms and adding shading to create the illusion of depth, Baldwin provides a mystical vision of nature that lovingly leaves the viewer at peace.
Harrison Pearce, Valence, 2024. Photo: Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale.
4. Harrison Pearce at the Gwangju Biennale
Blurring the boundary between science and art, Harrison Pierce is part painter, sculptor, and engineer. Inspired by brain scans that revealed an anomaly in the morphology of his brain, turned the asymptomatic analysis into fodder for artwork. Schooled in philosophy and fine art, the London-born and based artist spectacularly visualizes the brain’s workings with his surreal canvases and Dadaist machines. In the Gwangju Biennale exhibition, Pearce has a room full of modular kinetic sculptures made from inflated rubber forms and machine parts that rhythmically simulate the activity of the brain, with a sonic composition controlling a pneumatic system that causes the bodily organ to seem alive. It’s a hypnotic installation where sound and vision are in magical sync.
Peter Buggenhout, The Blind Leading the Blind #91, 2018-2023. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Buggenhout Studio.
5. Peter Buggenhout at the Gwangju Biennale
A Belgian artist with a large following in Europe, Peter Buggenhout has been widely exhibited since graduating from Sint-Lucas in Ghent with a degree in monumental arts. Best known for his raw, gritty sculptures that look like found industrial debris and paintings that resemble sections of abused, bloodied walls, Buggenhout simulates a sense of chaos by carefully constructing his pieces in the studio to seem like archeological finds. At the Biennale, Buggenhout’s works help set the stage for what’s to come with a series of disorderly paintings and sculptures in one of the initial rooms. His massive sculpture The Blind Leading the Blind #91 is a monument to an out-of-control consumer culture, where objects are quickly replaced and recycling is someone else’s concern. Elegantly crafted, he makes junk look like monumental art.
Marguerite Humeau, *stirs, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of Surface Horizon Ltd. Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale.
6. Marguerite Humeau at the Gwangju Biennale
Marguerite Humeau takes us back to prehistorical times and into the distant future by creating otherworldly objects, installations, and performances. Working with scientists, historians, anthropologists, paleontologists, zoologists, explorers, linguists, and engineers, she puts her concentrated research into the mysteries of the world to concrete use by realizing her vision as art. Born in rural France and based in London, she studied art in Paris and design in Eindhoven and London, where she was introduced to the process of using technological developments to visualize her ideas. Humeau’s imaginary Biennale installation, titled *stirs, presents a galaxy of hand-blown glass bubbles with light and pansori music surrounding a ghostly, draped figure holding a vessel with mud from an ancient Korean pond with 33-million-year-old bacteria, linking her marvelous installation to the primordial past.
Thandiwe Muriu, Vitruvian Woman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy 193 Gallery
7. Thandiwe Muriu at 193 Gallery, Kiaf SEOUL
A self-taught photographer, Thandiwe Muriu has risen to the top of her profession in an amazingly short time. Learning from books and YouTube videos, she acquired the skill of making pictures. Taking things a step further, she added her imagination and cultural background to the mix. Born and based in Nairobi, Muriu references the women, hairstyles, fashions, and print designs of the vibrant African lifestyle she experiences in the city and during her travels. Photographing super-stylized Blacks in highly patterned scenarios while they are wearing related designs and accessories, the talented artist blurs the line between abstraction and figuration. Her Vitruvian Woman picture at 193 Gallery’s Kiaf booth captures a chic young woman confidently posed in a psychedelic setting. With hair piled high and outlandish eyewear, she’s ready to meet the future with style and grace.
Azuki Furuya, The Three Graces, 2024. Photo: Courtesy Whitestone.
8. Azuki Furuya at Whitestone, Kiaf SEOUL
Building up layers of colored paper and photographs on panels and boards, Azuki Furuya then sands the surfaces of her compositions to get a surreal, modeled image that’s part figurative and part abstract. Born in Japan and educated in Tokyo, London, and Brooklyn, she appropriates subjects from Western art history but turns them into something lively and new with her spirited and transformative process. The Tokyo-based artist’s painting at Whitestone’s booth at Kiaf, appropriately titled The Three Graces. Taking the Renaissance subject painted by Raphael, Rubens, and Botticelli as her point of departure, Furuya brilliantly portrays the three seductive figures surrounded by various versions of themselves in a hauntingly derelict realm.
Karyn Lyons, Tuesday Heartbreak, 2024. Photo: Courtesy Carl Kostyál
9. Karyn Lyons at Carl Kostyál, Kiaf SEOUL
A painter of stylish young women in upscale settings and romantic scenes, Karen Lyons studied journalism and worked in the fashion industry before turning to painting. Based in New York, she looks back to her teens, 19th-century portraiture, and movies for visual inspiration, which she beautifully applies with lively brushwork to canvas. Her painting Tuesday Heartbreak, a standout at Carl Kostyál’s Kiaf group show booth, delicately depicts a young woman consoling herself with a cigarette in a room full of classical furnishings and paintings. Standing alone while gazing directly at the viewer, she conveys vulnerability and strength in an assuredly painted picture.
Cover: Installation view, Suh Se Ok X LG OLED Reimagined by Suh Do Ho, Shaped by Suh Eul Ho, Frieze Seoul 2024.
Photo: Courtesy of LG OLED
