The single best thing that I saw during Frieze Seoul?
A friend asked me right when I got back to New York earlier this month, and I had to stop and think. There were too many highs, too many surprising delights. There was a great deal of dross, too. (What art week doesn’t have that?) But the third edition of Frieze had the capital city, and South Korea as a whole, in peak condition. Galleries and museums staged ambitious shows and stayed open late. Smart, tough editions of revered biennials awaited further down the peninsula, in Busan and Gwangju. The festivities felt more cohesive than those of Frieze’s first two outings. The mood was giddy, buoyant, precarious.
Best in show at Frieze was in the booth of New York’s Tina Kim Gallery: This 9-feet-tall painting of beskirted legs from 2001–04 by the superb Kang Seok Ho, who died in 2021, only 50. Alluring, surreal, intimate, and strange.
—Andrew Russeth
