Big crowds, smaller checks as Frieze and Kiaf open in Seoul

Wednesday's preview at Coex was VIPs and press only, but it hardly felt that way.

By early afternoon, the aisles were packed with collectors decked out in designer bags and statement jewelry; gallery staff had already spent much of the day walking clients behind the booth walls to talk numbers.

Frieze Seoul and Kiaf Seoul opened side by side for a fifth year, kicking off what has long become the biggest event on the city's art calendar. Frieze brought 133 galleries from 30 countries and regions, up by more than 10 from last year. Kiaf, the homegrown fair now in its 25th edition, had 175 galleries from 18 countries.

The opening ceremony brought out Culture Minister Chae Hwi-young, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon and the chairs of Shinsegae Group and Lotte Group, Chung Yong-jin and Shin Dong-bin. On the floor, the stars turned out as well: actors Han So-hee, Park Eun-bin and The8 of Seventeen were spotted making the rounds.

"Kiaf and Frieze Seoul keep drawing bigger crowds every year," Oh said at the ceremony. "Cultural events are getting underway all over the city, like one big museum without a roof. I hope everyone gets out and enjoys them."

Upstairs, Frieze followed the pattern of a softer market: buyers passing on the multimillion-dollar showpieces and spending readily below the top end.

Nothing on the scale of last year's top sale — a Mark Bradford painting that went for around $4.5 million — changed hands on the first day. But works in the low to mid six figures kept moving instead, most of them at major galleries.

The top sale of the day came from Thaddaeus Ropac, which sold Adrian Ghenie's "Figure with Funerary Stele" (2026) for 1.1 million euros ($1.28 million) and Antony Gormley's cast-iron "HOLD" (2024) for 750,000 pounds ($1 million).

The Swiss mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth reported sales between $185,000 and $600,000 for works by Louise Bourgeois, Lorna Simpson and Jenny Holzer, though the $3.5 million George Condo out front that had everyone stopping was still available at closing time.

White Cube sold a Gerhard Richter for 625,000 euros and a late canvas from Park Seo-bo's signature "Ecriture" series for $300,000; Gladstone sold several Keith Haring works on paper for $200,000 to $275,000 apiece.

Away from the marquee booths pulling the biggest crowds, though, the picture was mixed. "The morning's been slower than the past few years," said a representative of a local gallery based in Gangnam, southern Seoul. "With the market the way it is, collectors seem to be sticking to the big galleries and the names they already know."

Frieze has pitched this year's edition around what director Patrick Lee called "galleries working outside the cities that usually get noticed first." The first-timers held up their end, adding some variety to the usual blue-chip rows.

Tansbao Gallery, a Taipei outfit devoted to art from the Himalayan region, is making its Frieze Seoul debut in the new Spotlight section for overlooked 20th-century artists, with a solo booth of the Nepali modernist Lain Singh Bangdel (1919-2002).

"He was really the first Nepali artist to train professionally in the Western style, first in Calcutta and then in Paris in the '50s," said Lou Mo, curator of the presentation. "As the Asian market gets more diverse, Asian artists and researchers are getting more confident about an Asian identity, and it's not necessarily limited to East Asia anymore."

Seoul, she added, has grown immensely as an art destination over the past 10 to 15 years: "It's not Hong Kong, and it's not trying to be Hong Kong."

Hafez Gallery of Jeddah, the first-ever Saudi gallery to show at Frieze Seoul, gave its booth to the Egyptian painter Ibrahim El Dessouki, whose recent desert landscapes hung beside earlier canvases built on newspaper imagery and portraiture.

The artist, whose last show was in London, said he had spent the morning studying how a Korean crowd looks at his work. "I follow their eyes to see what they can receive and what they can't," El Dessouki said. "They respond to the flow of the painting, the simplest and most minimal side of it, not the complications."

Downstairs in Halls A and B, Kiaf looked like a bigger fair than it was — the result of a new floor plan rather than a larger roster.

Black carpet ran the length of the main aisles and the sightlines opened up across the halls. In Hall B, a plaza of cafe tables run by local brands stayed full well into the afternoon. Special exhibitions dotted the floor, among them one on the body and instinct in the age of AI.

The makeover is largely the work of fashion designer Jung Ku-ho, who was brought on this year as the fair's first creative director.

"A fair shouldn't have any dead zones that nobody bothers to walk to," Jung said. "The special shows were basically an excuse to pull people into every corner. Make the coffee easy to find, give people somewhere to sit when their feet hurt, and they'll stick around."

Sales downstairs leaned toward Korean names. Kukje sold a 1979 Yoo Young-kuk for 600 million to 720 million won ($440,000 to $530,000), while Gallery Hyundai sold several Nam June Paik works for 300 million to 500 million won each.

Lee Sung-hoon, president of the Galleries Association of Korea, which runs Kiaf, noted how much younger the crowd has gotten.

"We're seeing a lot more young collectors, and they're buying attractive work that isn't priced too high," he said. "They're not buying because they think a picture will go up. They buy it, hang it at home, the kids like it, they feel good about it. That's a healthy collector base, and once they warm up to art they'll move on to bigger works."

Jung's message for the general public, who get in from 3 p.m. Thursday, was to look beyond the big names.

"I hope they don't just chase the famous works," he said. "Every gallery here has something odd you haven't seen before. Go find it."

Frieze Seoul runs through Saturday; Kiaf Seoul through Sunday.