FRIEZE SEOUL, SEEN FROM LONDON, 2026

by Darriel Patrick

29/9/2026

Exhibition

Fair: Frieze Seoul 2026
Dates: 2–5 September 2026
Venue: COEX, Seoul, in partnership with Kiaf Seoul

Frieze Seoul's fourth edition, staged 2–5 September at COEX in partnership with Kiaf Seoul, brought together more than 130 galleries from 30 countries — and a notable proportion of them carry a London postcode.

Gagosian gave its booth entirely to Damien Hirst, spanning the Pill Cabinets, Spin Paintings and Spot Paintings that made his name in London three decades ago. A few aisles away, Hauser & Wirth anchored its presentation with Jenny Holzer's gold-leaf PROFORMA, shown alongside Louise Bourgeois and Lee Lozano, timed to coincide with Glenn Ligon's first solo exhibition in Korea. Lisson brought new work by Hugh Hayden and Anish Kapoor — the latter, like Hirst, a fixture of British sculpture since the 1980s — while White Cube paired a 2022 écriture by Park Seo-Bo with paintings by Marguerite Humeau, currently shortlisted for the 2026 Turner Prize.

Thaddaeus Ropac and David Zwirner, both with standing London galleries, added further weight: Ropac placed the late Georg Baselitz alongside the Korean painter Lee Kang So, timed to Kang So's Lotte Museum retrospective; Zwirner showed new paintings by Katherine Bernhardt beside Lucas Arruda, coinciding with Bernhardt's own travelling survey at Seongnam Arts Center.

Perhaps the clearest marker of London's footprint at the fair was curatorial rather than commercial: Frieze LIVE's headline commission, The Find Seoul, went to the British artist Ryan Gander, whose participatory work has anchored Frieze's public programme in London for over a decade. That a fair now four editions deep into Seoul still reaches for a London name for its signature live commission says something about how Frieze's institutional culture travels with its galleries, even as its audiences and artists increasingly do not.

None of this makes Frieze Seoul a British fair by another name — its strongest new sections this year, from the expanded Focus programme to the debut Spotlight strand foregrounding overlooked twentieth-century Korean and Asian artists, are pointedly building a curatorial identity distinct from London or Basel. But for a UK-based research centre watching from a distance, the density of London-founded galleries and British artists inside COEX this September was hard to ignore.

Exhibition Facts:
Fair: Frieze Seoul 2026
Dates: 2–5 September 2026
Venue: COEX, Seoul, in partnership with Kiaf Seoul