Frieze Seoul 2025

From September 3–6, 2025, the fourth edition of Frieze Seoul returns to COEX in Gangnam, consolidating Seoul’s role as Asia’s most energetically cross-wired art hub. More than 120 galleries from 30+ countries convene under one roof, but the fair’s real power lies in how it syncs private market energy with the city’s institutional metabolism and public imagination.

Italy’s presence is selective yet resonant. Mazzoleni (Turin/London, with a new Milan space on the horizon) leads with a sharp post-war and contemporary lens—Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Salvo—artists whose material intelligence and spatial rigor read fluently in East Asia’s discourse on surface, void, and repetition. The booth becomes less a national sampler than a thesis on Italian formality as living method.

Meanwhile, Italian heavyweights with deep Asian footprints—Galleria Continua and Massimo De Carlo—may not show on the official roster this year, but their sustained programming across the region (from Hong Kong to Paris) continues to prime demand for Italian practices during Seoul’s fair week. The net effect is a distributed Italian narrative: a few concentrated signals at COEX, amplified by long-running gallery ecosystems elsewhere. (Context from official and trade coverage.)

Frieze Seoul’s architecture of sections remains a curatorial statement. Frieze Masters threads antiquity to the twentieth century, offering ballast and historical counterpoint to contemporary spectacle—this year’s highlights span Japanese abstraction, Taiwanese avant-gardes, Korean modernism, and European lineages. Focus Asia is tightly scoped: ten solo presentations from Asia-based galleries founded in or after 2010, stewarded by advisors who keep the section disciplined and discovery-driven. The design of Focus—age-bounded, solo-focused—ensures that risk still has a sanctioned place at a blue-chip fair.

Frieze Seoul deliberately co-habits the week with Kiaf—Seoul’s long-standing art fair—creating a two-engine system where international and domestic markets circulate in tandem. This year also brings 24 first-time exhibitors and notable emphasis on Korean galleries, reflecting Seoul’s dual identity as both host and protagonist. The institutional layer is unusually dense: retrospectives and flagship shows at Leeum Museum of Art, MMCA, and Amorepacific Museum of Art braid scholarly depth into the week’s commercial tempo.

Frieze’s commitment now extends past the fair’s four days with Frieze House Seoul, a permanent, year-round venue in Yaksu-dong housed in a 1988 building—programmed for residencies, special projects, and curated exhibitions, and marked by a site-specific installation by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. It’s a structural wager: build civic presence, not just seasonal impact.

At the same time, the Paradise Art Night bridges visual and performing arts as Hugo Marchand and Hannah O’Neill, étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet, perform at Paradise City near Incheon. The evening draws collectors into a different temporality—one of lived virtuosity—while an on-site display by Joel Mesler loops pop literacies back into the fair’s aura.

Seoul’s fair week has become an orchestration across domains. Design Miami launches its first Seoul edition at Zaha Hadid’s DDP during Frieze week—a signal that the city’s cultural economy is now platform-agnostic, moving fluidly between art, design, and luxury urbanism. The rise is mirrored by editorial attention to Seoul’s museum landscape and artist-run scenes (from Samcheong-dong to Eulji-ro), and by the long horizon of the Centre Pompidou Hanwha opening in 2026—a future anchor already shaping the present.

Early reporting paints a picture of scaled-back spectacle with solid sales across Frieze and Kiaf—an environment where considered placements trump pyrotechnics. For a maturing Asian market, this is not a retreat but a recalibration, privileging depth and fit over velocity. For Italian galleries, the signal is clear: Seoul rewards coherent narratives and material seriousness.

Frieze Seoul 2025 functions as a city-scale dramaturgy: galleries articulate propositions; museums test canons; design and performance expand the sensorial field; and a permanent Frieze venue stretches the week into a durable cultural cadence. In this ecology, the Italian contribution—condensed yet exacting—adds a grammar of surface, structure, and conceptual measure that converses fluently with Korean modernism and contemporary sensibilities. The result is not just another stop on the global circuit, but a laboratory of correspondences between geographies and epochs.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved