SEOUL—Gallery Seoul is Korea’s newest and smallest but in other ways most promising art fair. Now in its second year, the fair’s focused selection of 22 galleries from Korea, Japan, the United States, and Taiwan provides a pleasant, easy-going art buying experience. It also reflects much of what is great about the Korean contemporary art scene — a dedication to fostering young, local talent mixed with an engaged, highly informed internationalism.
The backbone of the fair, running April 20 through 23, is established Korean galleries presenting blue-chip secondary market works of well-known artists. Lee Ufan is especially popular here right now, with half a dozen of his paintings from the 1960s through the present shown at different booths. His Guggenheim retrospective last summer has done much to bolster the demand and prices for his work at home. It has also flushed out important early works for serious buyers.
The fair coincides with an exhibition surveying the history of Korean monochrome painting at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Mr. Lee has several paintings in this important show, as does Park Seo-Bo, another senior Korean artist who is also well represented at the fair. Johyun Gallery brought his “Ecriture No.051025” (2005), made up of the repeated layering and scraping with a pencil of sheets of wet Korean Hanji paper on canvas. It is priced at $130,000.
Korea has always had dedicated buyers of top-of-the-line Western contemporary art, and this is widely reflected at the fair. Highlights include works by Gerhard Richter (Page Gallery), Zhang Huan (Hakgojae), George Condo and Damien Hirst (Gana Art), Olafur Eliasson (PKM), Robert Indiana (Hyundai), and Anish Kapoor (Kukje). There are no bargains, and, if anything, international works are slightly more expensive here because of relative scarcity and shipping costs.
You don’t see many foreign collectors walking the aisles of the fair, located this year at Galleria Foret, a convention hall in the basement of a new, high-end residential and retail complex in the exclusive Seongdong-gu district. This isn’t Art Hong Kong, though in fairness to the organizers, Gallery Seoul was conceived more as an event for Korean collectors than another stop on the global art tour. Being small, focused and exclusive, the fair hopes to better serve local buyers.
Opening day business was slow, according to sales assistants at leading galleries, none of who wanted to be named. But sales were being made. The Bill Viola and Anish Kapoor works at Kukje were on reserve after a few hours. There was also a lot of interest in Lee Bul’s installation at PKM, an untitled mirrored wall work from 2008, priced at $150,000, as well as a collection of Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings and drawings at Takeda Art Co, a Tokyo-based gallery.
“Lamp, Flower, the Girl” (1993) was the best of the Nara works on offer. It was also easily the most expensive, priced at $850,000 — an astonishing amount given its modest size and relative unimportance in the artist’s overall body of work.
“I won’t have any problems selling it,” gallery owner Yasuyuki Takeda told me. “Nobody knows how high the market can go.” He was referring to the success of the artist’s recent retrospective at Asia Society and move to Pace Gallery, though he could have been talking about the Korean art scene, which has fast risen to regional prominence. Gallery Seoul hopes to tap that success.
Benjamin Genocchio is the editor-in-chief of Art & Auction and Artinfo.com.