The stage is set: Frieze Seoul 2025 returns this September, not simply as an art fair but as a sprawling, city-wide performance of culture. From the electric backstreets of Euljiro to the gleaming rooftops of the Seoul Museum of Art, the fourth edition of Frieze promises to scatter art across the capital like fragments of light across water.
Patrick Lee, the fair’s director, calls the lineup “a testament to the extraordinary depth and breadth of Korea’s contemporary art landscape.” That description feels apt, though perhaps still too modest. The 2025 edition does not merely showcase art; it orchestrates a choreography of voices—local, global, experimental, and urgent—that demands to be seen, heard, and felt.
Beyond COEX: Seoul as a Living Canvas
Anchored once again at Gangnam’s COEX Convention Centre (3–6 September), Frieze Seoul’s ambition spills out into the city itself. For four evenings (1–4 September), different neighborhoods will pulse with activity.
- Euljiro opens the program, a maze of print shops and cafés turned cultural hub, spotlighting non-profits, artist-run spaces, and the studio of Haegue Yang.
- Hannam follows with a showcase from global heavyweights like Lehmann Maupin, Esther Schipper, and P21.
- Cheongdam and Samcheong close the circuit, featuring blue-chip galleries such as White Cube, Perrotin, Gladstone, and Kukje Gallery.
Each district becomes a gallery without walls, collapsing the distinction between the fair and the living city.hodoxy.
Frieze LIVE: The Pulse of Performance
This year’s Frieze LIVE stakes its claim at the Art Sonje Center, where eleven next-generation Korean artists will grapple with queer narratives, gender sensitivity, and shifting notions of identity. Among them, Yagwang, Younghae Chang, Jimin Hah, and Ru Kim will confront what has shaped—and unsettled—contemporary Korean art.
These performances won’t stay confined indoors. Expect interventions across the city—from Kukje Gallery K2 to Dosan Park—each staging art as both provocation and communion.
Frieze Film: Cinema Under the Seoul Sky
The rooftop of the Seoul Museum of Art becomes an open-air cinema (2–4 September), where artists like Amit Dutta, Angela Su, and Hsu Chia-Wei explore occult lineages and spiritual traditions. Against the city’s neon skyline, these films will dissolve boundaries between the mystical and the political, between private memory and collective ritual.
Critical Conversations: Studio 159
No Frieze is complete without debate, and this year’s talks at Studio 159 promise sharp reflection. Themes range from the rise of Korean artists on the global stage to the role of AI in contemporary art, the intersections of queer Asian identity and digital memory, and the precarious ecosystems in which emerging galleries struggle to survive.
These are not polite panels. They are battlefields where ideas clash, revealing the fault lines of the contemporary art world.
Centerpieces at COEX
At the fair itself, highlights include:
- Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho’s process-led environment, which invites the kind of “close observation” that transforms looking into meditation.
- Liam Gillick’s plexiglass and furniture installation, a minimalist intervention that doubles as both sculpture and social space.
Such works resist spectacle for its own sake. They lure the viewer into subtler negotiations—between presence and absence, intimacy and distance.
Editor’s Choice
What emerges from this ambitious sprawl is not a fair frozen in convention halls, but a living portrait of art in Seoul—restless, layered, unafraid. From rooftop screenings to guerrilla performances, from the intimacy of studios to the gleam of international galleries, Frieze Seoul 2025 is less exhibition than city-wide manifesto.
To borrow Lee’s phrasing, it offers “a compelling snapshot of artistic practice today from across the Asian region and beyond.” Yet beyond the snapshot lies something else: a moving image of a city—and an art world—that refuses to stand still.