As the third edition of Frieze Seoul heads into its final day today, many international visitors are likely already on their way home. Some may have already left to head to the Gwangju Biennale, which is now in its 15th iteration and is curated this year by Nicolas Bourriaud. (Some of the festivities started on Thursday, causing many to leave Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning.) A few might continue to the Busan Biennale, which is also coinciding with Frieze this year.
But there is still a lot to see around Seoul, from Anicka Yi’s first survey in Asia to a major group exhibition looking at how Asia-based women artists have used their bodies in their work and much more.
Below, a look at six exhibitions ARTnews attended during the jam-packed fair week.
“Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
The best show I saw this week was, by far, “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists.” There is a lot on view across the exhibition’s six sections—with titles like “Flexible Territories of Sexuality” and “Bodies•Objects•Language”—and more than 130 artists from 11 countries across Asia. Several of the artists are established art stars, like Yoko Ono (represented by Cut Piece), but many are likely only well-known in their home countries. Walking through the cacophony of diverse perspectives on how the body can be “a place where various ideologies and situations intersect,” according to the introductory wall text, I was reminded of my experience seeing “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” which opened at the Hammer Museum in 2017. That exhibition helped rewrite the canon internationally and gave greater acclaim to the artists featured in it; “Connecting Bodies” has that same possibility. It desperately needs to travel.
Among the first video works in the exhibition is Mako Idemitsu’s tour of Womanhouse, the ur-work of feminist collaboration from 1972 that itself touched upon the many themes explored in “Connecting Bodies.” I was mystified by the haunting photographs of Korean artist Park Youngsook, whose work I had encountered earlier in the day at the booth of Arario Gallery. A 1992 painting titled The Fall of America by Ryu Jun Hwa is an assemblage of various sapphic-looking scenes that seem sexy, steamy, and perhaps even dangerous. The work seems to imply that it is lesbianism (or queerness more generally) that has aided in the US’s destruction; what’s powerful about it is that a number of the figures appear to be Asian women. In a room focusing on goddesses and cosmologies, the textile-based works of Lee Bul, Pacita Abad, and Mrinalini Mukherjee share space. A subsequent room has a 1987 photograph by Joo Myong-Duck from her “Artist Series” of Bul, wearing a sequin leotard and holding a crude baby sculpture upside down as she stares at the viewer, one arm on her hip. Elsewhere are three Artificial Placenta (1961/2003) works by Tabe Mitsuko that look more sterile than cozy.
There is so much to take in here, I wish I had had more time to delve deeper.
—Maximilíano Durón
