For curator Seolhui Lee, this year’s fair was a constellation of voices that became richer in each other’s company. Words by Seolhui Lee.
I have spent most of my curatorial life working in institutions, and perhaps because of that, I have always found myself looking for the larger picture. I rarely experience an exhibition one artwork at a time. My instinct is to look for relationships – how artworks change when they share a space, how one presentation shifts the reading of another, how different artistic languages create unexpected conversations. I often imagine exhibitions as constellations, where each work allows another to reveal something new.
This way of thinking accompanied me while advising the 2026 Focus section at Frieze Seoul. Although the section consists of sixteen solo presentations by galleries established in or after 2014, I rarely experienced them as isolated booths. Throughout the selection process, I imagined them as parts of a larger exhibition – a spatial composition where distinct artistic propositions could coexist while retaining their individuality. I found myself wondering how one booth might color the experience of the next, creating moments of harmony, friction and surprise across different media, generations and cultural contexts.
One of the aspects that feels particularly distinctive this year is that Frieze Seoul Focus expands beyond its previous regional framework for the first time. Bringing together galleries from Asia, Europe and the Americas does not result in a single narrative, nor should it. Instead it creates multiple points of entry into contemporary artistic practice. Painting, sculpture, installation, moving image and interdisciplinary work engage with questions of technology, memory, ecology, identity, material culture and social transformation. Rather than converging around a shared theme, the presentations reveal how artists working in different contexts often arrive at unexpectedly related concerns.
Among the projects that stayed with me most are the presentations by Gabriel Massan with Yehudi Hollander-Pappi from São Paulo and Omyo Cho with Foundry Seoul. Both are artists whose practices I have followed for several years, and it has been rewarding to see their proposals develop for this year’s Focus. Even before this year’s Focus, they had stayed with me for the very different ways they approach contemporary experience: one through speculative digital worlds, the other through quiet material encounters.
What draws me to Massan’s work is the way they expand speculative worlds without losing sight of lived social realities. Combining digital environments, gaming aesthetics and storytelling, they construct alternative imaginaries that question inherited structures of power and identity. Fiction in their work becomes less an escape from reality than a way of imagining different futures.
Cho approaches contemporary life from an entirely different direction. Her installations unfold through subtle encounters between objects, materials and spatial perception, inviting viewers into a slower rhythm of looking. Rather than demanding attention, the works accumulate meaning through careful observation, creating spaces that feel intimate while remaining conceptually expansive.
Although their visual languages differ greatly, both artists transform contemporary experience into immersive environments that extend beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. Seeing these two presentations together creates precisely the kind of dialogue that excites me – practices that are fundamentally different yet somehow illuminate one another.
Another thread I kept noticing throughout this year’s Focus is an attentiveness to archives – not simply as repositories of the past, but as living structures through which histories can be revisited and reimagined. I admire how Yongjae Lee with Caption and Lilyjon with Cub_ism_ Artspace engage archival thinking. Their practices suggest that collecting, preserving and reorganizing images, narratives and memories is never passive; archives become active sites where overlooked stories acquire new visibility.
Equally compelling is the presence of materially driven practices. Artists such as Seungean Cha with Pipe Gallery and Ayla Tavares with Lamb demonstrate how material itself can become a way of thinking through labor, cultural memory, intimacy and transformation. Traditional techniques are not treated nostalgically, but reimagined through contemporary artistic languages.
I have also found myself returning to presentations that embrace a more intimate scale because they ask me to slow down. The presentations by Botond Keresztesi with Longtermhandstand and Bekhbaatar Enkhtur with Matèria reward sustained looking, reminding us that artistic impact is never measured by physical size.
Looking back, what has stayed with me most is not one overarching theme, but a series of relationships that gradually emerged between presentations – a speculative digital universe echoing an archival gesture, a handcrafted object speaking to an immersive installation, a small painting subtly changing the rhythm of the booth that follows.
Those conversations may not always be immediately visible, but they are there, quietly connecting different geographies, materials, histories and ways of imagining the world. It is within those relationships that this year’s Focus ultimately reveals itself – as a constellation of singular artistic voices whose differences become even richer in each other’s company.
