Art fairs may have started out as trade shows for dealers to sell each other their inventory, but they have long since become major events in the art world’s attention economy, zhuzhed up with public art commissions and intellectual dressings, including elaborate programs of public talks and film screenings, as well as plain old fun events like concerts. (As I wrote in 2020, the Armory Show even once offered a museum-style audio guide.)
The public programming for the upcoming edition of Frieze Seoul this September includes a citywide hunt for thousands of custom-made artist’s coins, along with films, talks, music and special projects. The fair’s fifth edition (September 2–5) features more than 125 galleries from over 30 countries, and takes place at the COEX convention center in the posh Gangnam neighborhood.
“The program we are presenting this year is built on the belief that a fair should be more than what happens inside its walls—it should be felt across the city it calls home,” said Patrick Lee, the fair’s director, in press materials.
Accounting for the greatest amount of real estate among the programming offerings will be British artist Ryan Gander’s city-wide public art project, The Find Seoul, which involves him hiding some 16,000 coins of his own design throughout the city’s galleries, institutions, and neighborhoods. It’s the project’s fourth iteration of “The Find” and its first in Korea, where the coins will be spread throughout the Euljiro, Hannam, Cheongdam and Samcheong neighborhoods and the public spaces at COEX.
Gander’s coins will be “embossed with a different piece of wisdom to carry or act on,” according to press materials. When the same project was unveiled at the Manchester International Festival in 2023, the Art Newspaper wrote that “It is amazing how competitive art world luminaries can be in the quest for an objet d’art.” The project will run from August 31–September 10, launching in Euljiro.
The fair is collaborating with the Busan Biennale on a film program with screenings at SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, extending the Biennale’s theme, “Dissident Chorus.” Among the artists featured are Alison Nguyen, Umi Ishihara, Bhenji Rha, Luiz Roque, Moe Satt, Brahim Tall, Tanat Teeradakorn and Natasha Tontey.
Frieze x PB (Print Bakery), Frieze Seoul 2025.
The fair’s setting is appropriate for a talk featuring three of Korea’s leading artists, Ayoung Kim, Chan Sook Choi, and Christine Sun Kim, all featured in the upcoming exhibition “Minor Feelings,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is set to focus on Korean art. They’ll discuss diasporic identity and Korean art-making today, in an exchange with curators Christine Y. Kim and Harry C. H. Choi. Also on the talks agenda is a conversation among Korean artists Gwon Osang, Ahn Sungseok and Kim Miyoung about the relationship between artists and commercial brands.
Some artistic interventions are very understated. Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho’s Mobile Agora consists simply of a number of recycled plastic chairs in a circle, creating a space for conversation for subjects including plastic pollution, the climate crisis, and more sustainable futures.
Some 15 Korean artists, meanwhile, will reinterpret the moon jar, a classic item in Korean visual culture, with The Moon Jar Constellation, the fair’s second collaborative project with PBG (Print Bakery), an art platform aiming to make art accessible. A portion of proceeds will go to support UNICEF.
The recipient of the fourth Frieze Seoul Artist Award, the Seoul-based collective Yagwang, formed by Terri Kim and In Jeon, has been commissioned to create Facade Zone (2026), a site-specific sculptural installation that will involve dismantling a fair booth’s walls and reploacing them with an exposed wooden framework displaying latex sculptures based on figures from Korean Buddhist iconography, under ever-changing lighting, as a way of highlighting the mechanisms of display.
