Baby Goes to Frieze Week Seoul 프리즈서울
Essay / 10 September 2026 / By: Yoona
No one goes to an art fair to fall in love with art. Or to fall in love. Yoona went because she was in Korea to get a colonoscopy. At the fair, she identitfied that she "Reeks of American individualistic guilt" to her motherland amongst what she labels the condition of uniformity amongst Frieze Go-ers, clothing wise.
Frieze Seoul achieved a level of absurd Frieze anywhere else (™) could never: "They juxtaposed Keith Haring works with hentai cat girl paintings and it was all just so abominable that it brought a genuine smile to my face."
The essence:
Does the amount of complimentary consumables at an art event accurately indicate its wider art scene’s health?
Chanel Bag count: 40
Birkin Count: 4
Non Classic Flap Chanel: 26
keeping an open heart, mind, and eye to whatever piques your interest – which, for me, tends to be works that lean heavily on a certain feminine sensibility.
⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ 슈퍼스타가 말한다. UwU . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
I arrived in Korea in time to catch the last 48 hours of Frieze Seoul. The week is: gallery nights, cocktail receptions, and performances organized by neighborhood: Euljiro Night on Monday, Hannam Night on Tuesday, Cheongdam Night on Wednesday, and Samcheong Night on Thursday. I missed Euljiro, Hannam, and Cheongdam Night because I was sedated in a hospital bed getting my endoscopy, colonoscopy, bloodwork, and a million other tests done, but as soon as I got out of the hospital Thursday morning it was game time.
Thursday: Afternoon at MMCA (the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) aka my favorite museum in all of South Korea that you just have to visit if you’re ever here. I came for the newly opened Do Ho Suh exhibition and waited in line for an hour, keeping myself entertained with people-watching – as one does – visually surveying those around me for a general sense of current Seoul fashions. The monochromatic ‘safe’ outfit (which ranges in normalcy between Uniqlo mannequin and how you’d maybe see Hyein Seo pieces styled on SSENSE) generally rules the city. For better or for worse, it’s a symptom of the overall culture of social conformity here. That should, in theory, make me feel some type of way standing in that line with my hot pink dip-dye hair and Halloween-hued geometric print L.A.M.B. bag, but I’m no longer fazed by these things because I’m a mildly self-absorbed girl who thinks my outfit is the most tasteful in the room anyways and who has accepted the fact that, to my motherland kin, I probably reek of an American individualistic spirit.
The monochromatic ‘safe’ outfit (which ranges in normalcy between Uniqlo mannequin and how you’d maybe see Hyein Seo pieces styled on SSENSE) generally rules the city.
In short, the Do Ho Suh exhibition was kinda life changing. Suh (born in Seoul; lives and works in London) is best known for his irl-scale sheer fabric sculptures that reconstruct the various homes he has lived in during his lifetime — the home being a space that comes to contain a certain psychospatial energy. And let me tell you, I was Psychospatially Energized. Every plane of Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), including the ceiling, is adorned with doorknobs, wall phones, outlets, lamps, and other home fixtures from Suh’s life, all lifesize in delicate, bright fabric. It felt like being inside a giant bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. I know the word whimsical is a bit of a touchy word right now but that’s truly what it was. Seeing Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022) in person, I genuinely thought I might cry. The work is made entirely of paper rubbings of the hanok home where Suh grew up, constructed to scale in the gallery space. Rubbing as an act of love is the main conceptual crux of the work, but there’s also this bilingual wordplay with how “rubbing” and “loving” sound the same in English when pronounced by a native Korean speaker. There’s something about that that will always make me emotional… Probably something having to do with some sort of diasporic grief… No need to get into all that here, but all this to say that the Do Ho Suh exhibition at MMCA is a must see.
I had about an hour to kill before I was to meet a girl from Instagram who had messaged me that she was working the ArtDrunk cart in front of Kukje Gallery. I spent that time wandering through the other open Samcheong Night galleries, popping in and out of Gallery Chosun, Hakgojae Gallery, Kumho Museum of Art, and Gallery Hyundai – all of which were brimming with bodies but not much else interesting. When I got to Kukje, host of the official Samcheong Night party until midnight, there was an insane line for the free food catering and every gallery room was teeming with people of all ages – and seemingly of all levels of artistic inclination – among Park Seo-Bo’s paintings. I had never seen that much free food and drink at an art event in my entire life. Like there was something about it that made me feel proud almost, that the Korean art scene was presumably so vibrant and financially healthy enough to offer such Abundance. None of the Frieze-adjacent events I went to in LA this past February had complimentary food and the Kiko Kostadinov × ASICS Ryan Trecartin presentation was the only one I remember with an open bar. Does the amount of complimentary consumables at an art event accurately indicate its wider art scene’s health? Such generosity and abundance being offered by an arts institution to its public… It was a culture shock to me, an American.
Does the amount of complimentary consumables at an art event accurately indicate its wider art scene’s health?
Eventually I found the ArtDrunk cart and met [name redacted] who was so sweet and gave me one of their Frieze week Survival Kits. It included some hangover jelly and instant Americano sticks and I just thought that that was so Korean. Lol. There wasn’t really any artwork in all of my Samcheong Night gallery-hopping that I was moved by. I was there to vibemaxx anyways, but I left early to walk through Gyeongbokgung Palace and went to bed that night hopeful that I’d see something Amazing Awesome Insane Lifechanging or at the very least Memorable at the fair.
The next day, I made my long arduous trek over to Gangnam (I’m staying with relatives in the west tip of Seoul) to the COEX center hosting both Frieze and Kiaf. I started at Frieze, wandering the maze of booths in that giant white hall like some flâneuse without any gallery to beeline for. I think this is the ideal approach to experiencing a fair or any situation where there are hundreds if not almost a thousand artworks in one place; keeping an open heart, mind, and eye to whatever piques your interest – which, for me, tends to be works that lean heavily on a certain feminine sensibility.
My favorite works, in no particular order:
At a certain point I got tired of the art and felt I had pretty much seen everything I needed to see at the Frieze side. I’d been there for about an hour, which made me feel like I maybe went too fast. So even though I was tired as shit, I forced myself to keep walking between the booths. To appease my bored, dopamine-addicted attention span that thirsts for Reels, I kept myself stimulated by keeping a Chanel bag and Birkin tally in my Notes app. When the count of Chanel bags reached 26, that started getting boring too, so I changed my criteria to increment my counter only if it was a non classic flap. Once my Chanel bag counter reached 40 and Birkin counter 4, I sat down in the corner to rest and post on my Instagram Story – as one should mid-fair.
When the count of Chanel bags reached 26, that started getting boring too, so I changed my criteria to increment my counter only if it was a non classic flap.
I posted about the popular bags I was seeing (the Goyards, Issey Miyake Bao Baos, Balenciaga Cities) and their respective demographics of choice – the points for which I don’t need to reiterate here. After the bag counting game got boring, I started playing Sweet or Sour, where you look out the back of the bus and smile at the passing drivers to see which smiled back (sweet) and which didn’t (sour). My Frieze-adaptation of the game essentially entailed speedwalking by the booths, making very overt eye contact with the gallerists huddled at their corner tables and smiling at them to see what my hit rate would be. I ended with 6 sweet and 41 sour before taking the escalator to Kiaf.
My favorite booth from the entire day was Dohing Gallery on the Kiaf side. They showed these insane, hyperrealistic paintings of porcelain doll objects by Seoyeon Kim. When my aunt went the next day, she said that all of Seoyeon’s work had been sold. Kiaf had more of the pop-art, kitschy, tasteless works like glittery paintings of Chanel and Nike sneakers, rhinestoned Buddha and KAWS-type sculptures, and this one booth I was honestly so enthralled by because they juxtaposed Keith Haring works on a wall adjacent to these hentai cat girl paintings and it was all just so abominable that it brought a genuine smile to my face.
Something I had also noticed across both fairs was that nearly all the Japanese galleries do cute, in the sense that the cute art object appears to be the dominant theme. Cute as a mode – not just for the artists in creating these cute-entrenched, Yoshitomo-Nara-esque works but seemingly for the galleries as well. Almost like the cuteness as branding felt like their approach to selling the work. What felt like leaning heavily into the Orientalist stereotypes that conflate cuteness with East Asia and especially anything Japanese was done to such an overt extent that it almost felt like some radical act of autonomy… a reclamation of kawaii… perhaps even the cute as a mode of self-determination… But this is my generous reading of it dressed up in big words; many of these works were low-vibrational and spiritually-obsolete, or just not my cup of tea but were probably low-hanging fruit enticing to Korean chaebols looking to decorate their newborn’s playroom in their Jeju vacation home, or something.
After perusing all that Kiaf had to offer, I plopped myself in the corner and took a moment to process all that I had seen. I had this epiphany that my approach to the fair – consuming as much as I could within a short period of time without any preordained direction or affinities – rendered my experience of the art into something akin to Clavicular’s speed dating stream. With all the options to see and with the speed at which I was consuming them, an artwork truly had a fraction of a second to pique my interest before I was already onto the next. I genuinely felt like Clav interrupting a girl mid sentence to dismiss her for the one behind her. But I think this Clav speed dating metaphor works really well because, like the power dynamic at play between Clav (who maintains the attitude that these girls are to impress him and not vice versa) and the girls (who come in eager to win him over), I approached the art with the attitude that they were to impress me, and had a mere second to do so. I didn’t have much of this willingness to give in to any piece or allow it to grow on me by really sitting with it – although, I did have my Woah Vicky (the Yoo Choongmok piece).
However, I think it’s important to admit my superficiality as a viewer, because the honest truth is that I only had a very surface-level interaction with the works. The conditions of the fair also make this so, simply because of the sheer mass of art to see, the absence of descriptive context, and the constant movement of foot traffic that unconsciously keeps your legs walking despite your eyes and heart maybe being glued to a piece. An art fair is not where you go to fall in love with an artwork. Or to fall in love. There’s nothing wrong nor depressing about this – most artworks for me fall into the category of Like and rarely into Love anyways – but I think this is what makes art fairs feel like a grand game of surfaces. I had more fun studying the people there than the works, but that is one of the pleasures that art offers; it brings people together. Cliché yeah I know, but true. At the very least, it creates a chance to fraternize with others around some shared aesthetic affinity and what else would you possibly want to do besides that? That is seemingly the predominant mode of living nowadays anyways and Frieze is really just a microcosm of it…