Frieze New York’s 15th edition opens at the Shed with much-needed energy and experimentation. With 68 galleries across three floors, the fair is leaner than Frieze London or Los Angeles. It’s walkable in a thorough afternoon, full of sharp discoveries. Arriving days after the Venice Biennale and alongside T.E.F.A.F. New York, Independent, N.A.D.A., and the spring auctions, this edition of Frieze holds its position by highlighting the more intellectual programs and a strong international presence. Notable is the depth of Latin American representation, with galleries and artists from Mexico City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Korean artists are also a compelling thread throughout the fair this year: Michael Joo at Kukje (also in Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys” at the 61st Venice Biennale), Anicka Yi and Lotus Kang at Esther Schipper, Ayoung Kim and Christine Sun Kim at Gallery Hyundai. The fair’s intellectual center of gravity is curator Lumi Tan’s third Focus section, where the solo presentations consistently outshine the larger booths elsewhere. Take Bettina’s 1971 "French Keys" tapestries at Ulrik, Catalan pioneer Antoni Miralda’s downtown New York archive at Champ Lacombe, Joanne Burke's feminist bronze and aluminum castings at Soft Opening, Rosario Zorraquín’s mystical scenes of suffering rendered on cheesecloth at Isla Flotante, and Aki Goto’s glitter-encrusted dental furniture and home video at Europa. What follows are seven standout booths from the main floor.
Tina Kim
Tina Kim commits the booth to textile as the medium of crossing: six women, three generations, each working in fiber or its analog. The pioneering Korean fiber artist Lee Shinja’s Image of Light, 1986, sets the historical floor with a wool tapestry. Pacita Abad’s Door Connects Me to the Greatest Happiness I Have Known, 1999, renders a Sanaa doorway in trapunto and stitched buttons, evidence of her travels through Yemen in 1998. The late Suki Seokyeong Kang’s Rove and Round—face #23-01, 2016–2023, suspends a dyed mesh laundry bag from a wheeled steel frame, as if domestic mobility has caught into one object. Maia Ruth Lee’s B.B.Clement 1-13, 2026, is the ink-stained afterimage of a bundle once bound in cord, mapping the artist’s early memories of Kathmandu migrant luggage. In Mire Lee’s Untitled #5 (framed flat skin pieces from Open Wound), 2025, skin pulled into frame through industrial mesh salvaged from her 2024 Tate Turbine Hall commission. Jennifer Tee’s Tampan World Mountain, Naga ~ Nagini, 2024, collages Dutch tulip petals into the geometry of Indonesian Lampung tampan cloth, ceremonial fabric for births, deaths, and crossings. Here, diaspora is remembered through fiber.
—Qingyuan Deng
