Seoul Is The Art World’s Hot New Destination

It was a hot summer day in Seoul, and I had taken refuge from the sun in the cool, industrial studio of the Korean artist Kim Yun Shin. Dressed in denim overalls, with a poof of gray hair, Kim, 89, had the demeanor of a woman content with her life. Through a translator, I admired the sculptures lining the walls: blunt wooden pieces cut with a chainsaw, many of them painted, some replicated in bronze. They all had a geometric quality that felt distinctly modern, but also reminded me of the joinery of a hanok, or traditional Korean house. 

Kim explained that she made them from algarrobo, a type of wood native to South America—not the red pine traditionally used in this region. As we walked through her studio—she moved slowly, steadying herself with a cane—she told me how she came to work in that material. She was born in 1935, at a time when Korea was under Japanese occupation, in the city of Wonsan, now in North Korea. She always knew she was an artist. Nature was her first teacher—as a child, she would draw in the dirt with a stick. But after the conflict between North and South Korea in the early 1950s, there were no trees left. Everything had been cut down.

We paused to look at drawings Kim made as a lithography and sculpture student in Paris in the 1960s. She lived in Europe for several years, then returned to Korea to teach and work. Soon after, though, on a trip to South America for an exhibition, she had an epiphany. “When I saw the forests there, I wanted to stay,” she said. Kim moved to Argentina in 1984, and lived in the country for 40 years. It wasn’t just about the materials: Kim found it easier to work as an artist there. In the 80s, she explained, life in Korea was hard. There were no museums and galleries to show her work. Women had fewer resources. The Korea we see today is completely different—modernized, digitized, constantly metabolizing and evolving. “The youngsters now,” she added, “are really fast.” 

Today, South Korea has the world’s 14th-largest economy, and its evolution from an underdeveloped, war-torn country to one of Asia’s financial powerhouses had been on full display as I drove across the city to visit Kim that morning. Towering office buildings shimmered in the heat, and the streets bustled with workers on their way to office jobs. In the blocks surrounding my plush hotel in the Gangnam district, I noticed numerous plastic-surgery offices (and the occasional patient emerging, bandaged and bruised, fresh from a procedure). There were high-end retail spaces like the concept store Haus Dosan where, the previous evening, a life-size animatronic robot had greeted me as I had browsed pieces by Gentle Monster, a hip South Korean eyewear brand.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the Frieze Seoul, which was to begin the day after I arrived. In 2022, Frieze—which operates art fairs in London, New York City, and Los Angeles—introduced its first Asian iteration in Seoul: an indication of South Korea’s robust appetite for contemporary art. The capital has several museums specializing in the genre, including the Seoul Museum of Art, the Leeum Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as well as dense gallery scenes in neighborhoods like Samcheong and the upscale Hannam-dong. 

Back in Kim’s studio, we slowly wrapped up the tour. She showed me sculptures she was considering sending to London for Frieze Masters, an offshoot of the fair for artworks produced before the year 2000, and said that she had just exhibited at the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s premiere art exhibitions. These achievements represent the kind of recognition many artists dream of, but Kim said she never aimed to exhibit in art fairs or compete for prizes; she has always been more focused on the work itself. I admired her indifference to the market. It was remarkable to look at not just her body of work, but to think of how much of Korea had changed in her lifetime, and how her career as an artist reflected that. 

On her bookshelf stood a miniature turtle sculpture. I asked her if it had any special meaning. “Turtles live a very long life,” she said. “I want to live a very long life, too.” 

The next morning was the opening day of Frieze. I joined the crowds of artists, curators, collectors, museum leaders, and gallerists entering COEX, with its glass walls and cavernous halls. I passed the David Zwirner booth, where a Yoyoi Kusama pumpkin and a Gerhard Richter painting were on prominent display. Kukje Gallery, which represents Kim and is one of the most established in South Korea, had a large booth displaying works by painter Park Seo-Bo and the pioneering multimedia artist Suki Seokyeong Kang. 

I spotted many of the art world players who have staked a serious claim in Seoul. The London gallerist Jay Jopling, who opened a branch of his White Cube gallery in Dosan in 2023, was standing in his booth, discussing tax breaks with a man in a suit. Antwaun Sargent, a director of Gagosian Gallery, was there from New York City to help oversee the opening of a small show of Derrick Adams’s paintings at AMPA Cabinet, a gallery located in the headquarters of beauty conglomerate Amorepacific. 

The people who populate an art fair are always fashionable, and always discreet. Gallerists and their employees were tastefully adorned in quiet-luxury labels—Loro Piano, the Row, Celine, and Dries Van Noten—and sitting at tables bearing equally discreet floral arrangements. Well-to-do South Koreans roamed the fair. Occasionally, celebrities made an appearance, like the K-Pop star Joshua Hong of the boy band Seventeen, who I could only just glimpse through the crowd of fans and bodyguards that surrounded him. 

It was in the Focus Asia section—where only 10 Asian galleries were invited to exhibit—that I found the sense of discovery I was looking for. The booths had the feel of an exhibition, rather than of a commercially driven art fair. The galleries were smaller and took risks with emerging artists or artists with less of a shiny blue-chip appeal. Amid the frenzy of buying, it was refreshing to see their points of view. 

I was particularly taken by the work of the Sri Lankan artist Kingsley Gunatillake, who is 73 years old and represented by the New Delhi gallery Blueprint.12. His striking work, Protest, depicts the bloodshed of Sri Lanka’s long civil war, using books that are charred or rendered illegible, often decorated with symbolic or figurative objects, like toy-soldier figurines marching across a soiled page.

At Frieze Masters, I gazed for a long time at the extraordinary paintings by the great mid-century abstract Korean painter Kim Whanki. Kim was born to a wealthy Korean family in 1913, but rebelled against his father and chose to study art in Japan. His focus was the vast change that Korea underwent in his lifetime, and he incorporated various principles of abstraction into the more traditional vernacular of East Asian art and decorative objects. In that crowded convention center, something about Kim’s painting, Moon and Mountain (1967), made the world stop for me. His sense of color and form—even the way a particular shade of blue felt as if it had been pulled straight from the night sky—was extraordinary. Out of curiosity, I asked for the price. The gallerist told me it was selling for approximately $5 million. 

Nearby, next to an incredible 18th-century ceramic moon jar from the Joseon dynasty, was another of his paintings, Refugee Train (1951). He painted it earlier in his career, before he fully abandoned figurative painting for abstraction. It depicted people in a black train against a flat blue and red background. They are, the gallerist explained, fleeing North Korea at the start of the war. I asked what the price was. It was not for sale, she informed me; it was on loan for the fair from a private—and anonymous—collector. That made me think, if much of Seoul is shiny and new with money to burn, the beauty of the city lies in its depth and sorrow. It is a place unafraid to confront its history in stark terms.

The next day, I met a Korean photographer named Myoung Ho Lee, in the city center, at the grounds of a part of Deoksugung Palace that was once known as Seonwonjeon Hall. During Korea’s imperial era—which ended in 1910, after more than 500 years of Joseon dynasty rule—Seonwonjeon was where portraits of kings were enshrined and royal memorial rites were held. Yet the two-story building in front of me didn’t look especially palatial, with its wooden beams and dusty windows. 

Through a translator, Lee said that Seonwonjeon was almost entirely destroyed by the Japanese—a fate that befell many imperial Korean landmarks during occupation. In fact, he went on, the building we were looking at was actually built in the 1920s as an executive residence for a Korean bank. It was later used as a girls’ high school. Soon, it was to be demolished, but for the last few months of its existence, the Korean government had granted Lee an artist’s residency there. 

Like most Koreans, Lee knows his country’s history well. He explained that at the beginning of the last century, imperial Japanese forces insisted on replacing Korean culture with their own. Openly speaking Korean at the time or using Korean names was a punishable offense. Today, as part of a nationwide project to restore cultural heritage lost during the war, the Korean government is rebuilding Seonwonjeon Hall, hoping to return the site to its former glory. It is expected to be complete in 2039. 

Lee pointed to two black tents filled with men in hard hats. Nearby, a lone chicken darted around a pile of large rectangular blocks of granite. Part of the restoration, Lee said, required workers familiar with the practice of ancient Korean masonry. Most of the workers with such knowledge were either elderly or close to retirement; as a result, they worked very slowly. As Lee talked, the sounds of hammers on stone echoed in the background.

Lee, however, was more focused on a decades-old Paulownia tree, often called the Empress tree in Korea, growing on the site. With its thick, slightly jagged trunk and foliage still dense and green in the summer season, it was a striking sight. Lee first started to photograph trees in 2006, and has since built a sizable body of work around this practice. He often erects a white backdrop behind his subjects using a crane, ropes, even a few pairs of hands, all of which he erases from the final image with digital retouching. The final result is a work of nature framed by a white backdrop, a way of removing the tree from the context of the natural world, while still reminding us that these giant plants are also, in their own way, works of art. 

“This tree has been a witness to everything,” Lee said of the Paulownia. At the end of our visit, he asked the small group of American journalists I was with to stand in front of the tree for a portrait. To fit us into the frame, Lee had to stand with his camera almost a quarter of a mile away, across the giant pit that will soon become the foundation for the new Seonwonjeon. We couldn’t hear him over the sound of the hammering masons, so the only way we knew he was finished was when he waved his arms. As I left, I thanked him for his time, aware of the fact I had witnessed a part of Seoul that will soon be destroyed and rebuilt.

That evening, I headed to the Jung neighborhood for Korean barbecue. Several in-the-know Koreans, including Patrick Lee, the director of Frieze Seoul, recommended Geumdwaeji Sikdang, or the Gold Pig. I used one of Seoul’s English-speaking taxi apps, Kakao T, to call a car for us: a group of friends I had collected from the fair—an art writer, an art publicist, and a few others. Once there, we stood impatiently in the long line in front of the restaurant. The Gold Pig is unassuming, with a plain white-tiled façade and rows of tables with metal grills and extractor fans to suction up the oily air. But since opening in 2016, it has earned multiple accolades—including a Michelin Bib Gourmand award, which recognizes excellent food at budget-friendly prices. 

It was worth the hours-long wait to eat freshly grilled pork, beef, and vegetables, dipped into the hot and spicy ssamjang sauce or rolled in salt. We ordered rounds of beer and soju, the drink of choice for late, freewheeling nights in this city. A few of the group had the energy to find a nightclub afterward. There was talk of karaoke. Maybe even a late-night stop at a Korean spa. That’s the thing about an international art fair: fueled by people gathered together from around the world, the energy can become infectious. It lends a city a sense of limitless possibility. 

The following day the heat had dissipated and the weather was overcast and drizzly. There was a deflated feel to the morning, a kind of collective hangover from the rush of openings, dinners, and events. Most of the people who arrived for Frieze Seoul had departed for another art fair, the Gwangju Biennale, by bus or train, or had already gone home. The sales numbers from Frieze had started to emerge. Booths had sold out. A painting by Hauser & Wirth artist Nicholas Party had sold for $2.5 million to a private Asian collector, the biggest purchase of the fair.  

I headed back to the city center, this time to Bukchon Hanok Village. I was visiting the home and studio of Teo Yang, a handsome Korean interior designer and artist who had created a beautiful, eclectic home out of two adjacent hanoks he purchased more than 10 years ago. Yang left Korea at the age of 19 to study interior architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; later he earned a degree in environmental design at the ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, California. But it was only after he began working with the Dutch architect and art director Marcel Wanders, who mines the rich history of the Netherlands for his own practice, that Yang began to look at Korea with new eyes, diving deep into the architectural history of his homeland. 

Hanoks date back to the 14th century and are made by joining wooden beams in a way that doesn’t require nails or other bindings. With their low ceilings, insulated mud walls, and floor-based heating system, hanoks are meant to withstand both Korea’s hot, humid summers and long, cold winters. Yang had designed his interiors to incorporate a tasteful mix of Western and Eastern décor: a wall covered in de Gournay wallpaper here, a Serge Mouille light fixture there, Joseon pottery and contemporary Korean art scattered throughout. A pine tree grew in the center of one of Yang’s courtyards. Yang’s studio manager told me that having a tree in the courtyard is not typical for a hanok, as Confucius believed one needed a clear view in one’s home. But the tree was perfectly elegant, its green boughs peeking above the low-slung roof covered in traditional gray clay tiles. 

Afterward, I walked through the streets of Bukchon Hanok Village, a popular tourist destination because of its architecture, shopping, and food. This is where brands like the Korean beauty label Sulwhasoo have converted traditional hanoks into stores, their wooden beams contrasting with sleek glass walls. I stopped to buy some goguma mattang, or candied sweet potatoes, from a street vendor. I also picked up a few rice cakes from Biwon Tteokjip, a sweet shop that first opened in 1949 and claims to use the same recipe it once presented to the king. 

I ended up at EOESeoul, a charming modernist-looking café, where I had tea with a young Korean architect, Daniel Song, who designed not just the café but the entire building. His firm, INTG., which he co-founded with his wife, Kate Cho, occupied both the top floor and the basement. The couple has developed a reputation for minimalist designs with a decidedly Korean point of view. Song and Cho studied architecture at Columbia University, then worked with several firms around the world, but chose to return to South Korea. Since starting their practice in 2016, they’ve gone on to design White Cube’s Seoul gallery, various private interiors, and a number of commercial spaces for Korean companies. 

Song took me on a quick tour, proudly showing me details throughout the building: the café’s lacquered sambe (hemp) countertops and the ceiling’s decorative wooden beams, which were rescued from a derelict hanok. His reverence for Korean culture was noticeable: fabrics were chosen to match the green of matcha tea or the burgundy of red-bean paste. As I left, Song gave me a small box of financiers made in the café, wrapped in a bojagi, or traditional Korean wrapping cloth. 

There was just enough of that afternoon left to stop by the Arumjigi Foundation, which is devoted to preserving traditional Korean culture. This nonprofit was started in 2001 by a group of volunteers who wanted to clean up palace grounds in Seoul that were at the time abandoned and overgrown. The foundation has now grown to encompass other crafts and traditional Korean practices. An exhibition on the top floor explained how Korean walls were once made by hand with straw and mud. On the ground floor, displays incorporated the work of contemporary artists with traditional Korean spaces. After several days of looking at art made after the 1950s, it was refreshing to be around such literal, but beautiful, objects and ideas. 

I returned to my hotel to get ready for one final Frieze dinner, hosted by Stone Island, the Milan-based fashion brand that is enormously popular in South Korea. That evening, I was served champagne on a hilltop overlooking Seoul. The city glittered around me. The menu stated that our dinner’s produce was from an organic farm in Surisan Provincial Park, some 27 miles south. The delicately plated courses included dainty slices of aged Korean beef with Parmesan fondue. 

I glimpsed the Korean DJ Peggy Gou posing for a selfie in the bathroom with a few of her friends, then posting it to her Instagram following of 4 million people. A Scottish creative director who lived in Paris chatted to me about New York restaurants and whether or not to have kids. Nearby a few Frieze executives from London discussed the pitfalls of jet lag with an American writer based in Berlin. For a moment, I marveled at the thought that we could be anywhere, really. Berlin. New York. London. Mexico City. For tonight, though, we were in Seoul. 

A version of this story will appear in the October 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Seoul on Fire.”