6 Standout Artworks from Frieze Seoul 2026

Returning to the sprawling COEX Center in the posh Gangnam district from September 2-5, the fifth edition of Frieze Seoul featured over 130 exhibitors from 30 countries and regions and drew 70,000 visitors, including collectors and institutions from around the world,

Scheduled alongside major museum exhibitions of renowned Korean artists, including London-based Do Ho Suh’s first comprehensive survey in his homeland at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and an exhibition showcasing Paris– and Seoul-based Lee Bae’s minimalist, monochromatic artworks, sculptures, and large-scale installations centered on the material and symbolic properties of charcoal at Museum SAN, Frieze Seoul also highlighted the city’s main gallery districts through openings and events, offering visitors the chance to explore Seoul’s vibrant art scene, architecture, and cuisine.

“Seoul’s art scene has its own momentum,” shared Patrick Lee, Director of Frieze Seoul. “This week, collectors and institutions came from more countries than at any previous edition, and galleries at the fair made sales across price points, from emerging artists to Korean modern masters. Frieze Seoul is increasingly international, but its character comes from Korea: the artists, galleries, institutions and collectors who make this city so special.”

Scroll through to discover our favorite artworks from Frieze Seoul 2026.

1. Tomokazu Matsuyama | Leeahn Gallery

A celebrated contemporary artist born in Japan and based in Brooklyn, Tomokazu Matsuyama is widely known for his vibrant, layered artworks that seamlessly blend traditional Eastern aesthetics with Western modern culture. Matsuyama runs a highly collaborative Brooklyn studio, where he and his team create a wide range of carefully crafted works, including collage-style paintings, mirror-polished public sculptures, colorful murals, and wearable art paired with textile installations.

His richly detailed paintings depict a global, intercultural community of nomadic people, of which he is a part. They blend the consumerist culture and celebrity focus of American Pop art with European art influences and the decorative aesthetics of Japan’s Edo period, all expressed through creatively shaped canvases. At the fair, two prominent galleries showcased his work. Leeahn Gallery, where he currently has a solo show at its Daegu location, presented paintings such as Liberation Back Home, which interprets a Biblical scene in which a young warrior on a colorful horse rides through a fantasy forest, alongside renowned Western artists and masters of Korean action-driven and meditative art. His Tokyo gallery, Kotaro Nukaga, featured his work in dialogue with 10 other diverse artists.

2. Ryan Gander | Lisson

An internationally acclaimed British conceptual artist, Ryan Gander is renowned for a highly diverse, eclectic body of work that resists a single style. Rather than sticking to a single medium, his work draws on associative thinking, connecting ordinary objects with profound philosophical ideas. Gander is especially recognized for his famous series of wall-embedded animatronic mice that emerge from wall debris holes, either stuttering or moving, serving as poignant metaphors for human vulnerability and resilience.

During the fair, Gander presented a massive, citywide public art project titled The Find Seoul as the headliner for the Frieze LIVE program, while also offering other artworks in the fair booths of Taro Nasu, Esther Schipper, and Lisson Gallery, where another of his animatronic sculptures, The thermals made me lazy, or The squatters (Smoky meet Monk’s Deflated Sculpture II), was on view. A hyperrealistic, fabricated gray-and-white stray cat that appears to be alive and sleeping, thanks to animatronics that mimic breathing. Its title acknowledges an influential work by another artist, Jonathan Monk, with the cat’s sleeping pedestal matching the exact size of the base of Monk’s referenced artwork.

3. Adrian Ghenie | Thaddaeus Ropac

Blurring the line between figuration and abstraction, Adrian Ghenie blends the personal, the political, and the art-historical in his convoluted, painterly portraits. A Berlin-based artist and one of the most celebrated painters to graduate from the venerable University of Art and Design in Cluj, Romania, he represented his Romanian homeland at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Rather than using traditional paintbrushes, Ghenie primarily uses palette knives, stencils, and spatulas to create his paintings. This choice enables incidental effects in his canvases, as he favors improvisation over precise planning. At Frieze Seoul 2026, Ghenie exhibited a new body of work from a series inspired by his recent relocation to Rome, depicting amorphous, contemporary figures set against the backdrop of the Appian Way. His works were prominently featured in Thaddaeus Ropac’s presentation, with additional works included in Pace Gallery’s group presentation. By the end of Frieze’s VIP opening, Ropac had sold the artist’s Figure with Funerary Stele for $1.3 million.

4. Do Ho Suh | Lehmann Maupin

Do Ho Suh, a leading South Korean contemporary artist known globally for his engaging, site-specific installations and sculptures that examine themes of home, memory, identity, and the distinction between public and private spaces, has led a highly nomadic life across Seoul, New York, and London, channeling his personal experiences of migration and cultural displacement into his art. At the fair, the acclaimed artist was featured in two major solo presentations that showcased different aspects of his practice, from translucent architectural installations to intimate works on paper.

Lehmann Maupin presented a solo exhibition of Suh’s work at their stand, featuring a large-scale, translucent polyester structure that meticulously layers the various international spaces Suh has lived in into a single home, along with pieces from his ScaledBehavior series. This series reimagines everyday domestic objects, such as doorknobs—like those in Perfect Home – New York, Berlin, New York, Seoul, Sant’Angelo in Pontano, New York, New York, Berlin, New York—as intricate fabric-and-thread art. STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery offered a more personal, reflective experience centered on Suh’s explorations of paper and printmaking, created during his 2026 residency at STPI in Singapore.

5. Keunmin Lee | PKM Gallery

A contemporary artist and musician based in Seoul, Keunmin Lee is renowned for transforming his personal experiences with hallucinations and nightmares into striking visual art. Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder over 20 years ago, Lee refused to accept the limiting medical labels that could have reduced his identity. Instead, he embraced his diagnosis, drawing on his subconscious visions to inspire his creative work. Lee primarily creates his hallucinatory mindscapes using oils, charcoal, pencil, and fluid pen lines. His works span various media, from visceral paintings and deep crimson compositions such as Overturned Flowerpot to automatic drawings made spontaneously without preliminary outlines, all unified by themes of psychological and societal inquiry.

6. Precious Okoyomon | Mendes Wood DM

Precious Okoyomon is a London-born, New York-based Nigerian-American poet, artist, and chef known for immersive, large-scale, and evolving living installations. Their work explores the complex intersections of nature, history, racialization, colonialism, and renewal. Rather than treating media as separate, Okoyomon views their multidisciplinary practice as a connected, organic flow they call an endless poem.

Okoyomon redefines traditional notions of time and space in their work, including living gardens that often incorporate invasive weeds or poisonous plants as metaphors for colonization, plant migration, and human movement. They also create large figurative sculptures from organic, tactile materials; ecosystems where pollinators are born, reproduce, and die; poetic text works; and stuffed animals, such as their oversized teddy bear, I pray for that which I cannot hold. If you missed the chance to see that piece at Frieze Seoul, you can still visit the artist’s large garden of wild and cultivated grasses at New York’s MoMA PS1, where you can climb through an interactive giant teddy bear sculpture.