Cheongdam-dong, on the other hand, is Seoul’s most upscale shopping district—its Rodeo Drive or Madison Avenue—and the ambience is glitzy rather than artsy. Fronting the area’s major thoroughfare are Prada and Gucci shops along with the Galleria Department Store, whose high-tech exterior presents a continuous light show of ever-changing colors. Cheongdam-dong has become the hot spot for small cutting-edge spaces such as CAIS, which features a mix of international and Asian contemporary-art stars, and Seomi & Tuus, focusing on today’s top-of-the-line design objects. Two of the big boys, PKM Gallery and Gallery Hyundai, are opening annexes in the neighborhood, evidence that this shopping district has become a prime art destination as well.

If Seoul can be said to have an art anchor, it’s Hyundai, Korea’s oldest gallery. Established in 1970, it introduced Marc Chagall,  Henry Moore, Joan Miró and other top Western masters to Asia. (In Korean, hyundai means “modern”; the gallery is not related to the automobile manufacturer.) Run by its founder, Myoung Ja Park, the space is as likely to show the New York artist Julian Schnabel as the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Although the country’s native art movement has yet to galvanize the international market as China’s has, Koreans are the most adventurous of all Asian collectors and the most apt to acquire Western works, bringing $700 million in foreign art to the country in 2007, according to a widely quoted Korean-newspaper report. “The most notable thing about the art scene in Seoul right now is the dramatic increase in the number of people who think of themselves as ‘collectors,’  ” says the sculptor Lee Bul, who is based in Seoul and is perhaps Korea’s best-known artist. “But it’s still a relatively small, insular world, so even though it’s led to a lot of excitement and confusion, there hasn’t been a corresponding surge in creativity or artistic development.”

“Korean collectors have always been interested in international contemporary art,” says Hyung-Teh Do, Myoung Ja Park’s son, who is the CEO of Hyundai and the director of doArt Seoul. DoArt, which also has a branch in Beijing, presents younger and trendier artists than Hyundai, located up the street. Do recently curated “The Alliance,” a group show featuring a mix of international artists, including Rachel Feinstein, Steve di Bennedetto and Lynda Benglis.  “Korean collectors travel a lot,” he says, “not only for fairs but also for biennials, and they have discovered that these are the kind of works collected by museums.”

The international reach of Korean collectors is also evident at Gana Art Gallery, a 9,000-square-foot complex that includes an exhibition space, a restaurant and a boutique. Like Hyundai, Gana, founded in 1983 by Ho-Jae Lee, is a family affair: One of Lee’s sons, Jung, now runs Galerie Gana Paris, and the other, Bong, heads the firm’s new space in New York’s Chelsea, on West 25th Street. The Seoul branch regularly presents artists who are well-known in New York and London—this past year, it had shows of artwork by Joel Schapiro and Keith Tyson and design objects by Ron Arad—as well as such contemporary Korean talents as Hwang Jai Hyoung and Do Song-Wook.  Additionally, Gana operates Insa Art Center, a commercial gallery-rental building in Insadong.

Gana and Hyundai may have created their own art franchises, but the gallery that pioneered this type of explosive expansion was Arario, the brainchild of the Korean retail tycoon and art enthusiast Kim Chang-Il. Kim’s first cultural project was a 12,000-square-foot minimuseum specially built to house his collection of contemporary, largely British art. He opened the space in 2003 in a shopping mall in his hometown of Cheonan, about an hour south of Seoul, stocking it with works like Damien Hirst’s Hymn—a 20-foot-tall version of the scientific model of the human body used by school children. Arario has since expanded with a branch in Sagandong; a 20,000-square-foot, David Adjaye–designed space on 25th Street in New York; and a gallery in Beijing.