On Solid Ground

PKM gallery, Seoul

PKM, one of the blue-chip galleries in the Sagadong neighborhood on Seoul's north side, shows the work of Sanggil Kim, whose photograph "Off-Line the Sound of Music International Community" (2005) is pictured here.

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A view of doArt Seoul

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Ron Arad Roy Lichtenstein Keith Tyson Joan Miro Francis Bacon Marc Chagall

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SEOUL—In sharp contrast with the now-famous boom in Beijing—where 300 galleries have sprung up overnight—Seoul’s art scene can be described as slow and steady. Standing in the quiet Jean Nouvel wing of the Leeum, Samsung Museum between an altered piano by Joseph Beuys and a pill-laden display case by Damien Hirst, one might wonder how the South Korean capital could be so often overlooked as a contemporary-art Mecca. The city doesn’t advertise itself as such, but it is probably the most westernized art scene in Asia, and it has matured without fanfare.

“Seoul’s is a tight, strong, small art scene but very solid, the opposite of what you find in China,” says Lynn Zelevansky, a contemporary-art curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who is working on an exhibition of contemporary Korean art slated to open in June 2009.

Seoul has built a solid gallery network over the past three decades, and local artists have gradually received recognition by museums and collectors worldwide. The city itself is simultaneously hyperactive and understated. It is in the midst of an explosion of new construction that has filled its center with glass-and-concrete skyscrapers, but business is still conducted with the grace and hospitality of a traditional Asian culture.  

Seoul, whose population exceeds 20 million when the surrounding suburbs are taken into account, has been entirely transformed since the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which began when Korea nearly defaulted on its international debt, eventually impelling the International Monetary Fund to step in with a $57 billion program to stabilize the region’s economies. The metropolis hugs both sides of the Han River, with its older districts and historic sites, such as the Gyeongbokgung Palace and the Dongdaemun Gate, located to the north and new high-rise developments and upscale shopping centers, all built in the past decade, to the south. It seems impenetrably vast and chaotic at first, but such landmarks as the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential palace, help orient visitors whizzing around in taxi cabs through the miles of office buildings, bathhouses, barbecue joints and karaoke bars.

Turn a corner in Insadong, an avenue that serves as Seoul’s primary tourist neighborhood, and suddenly you are in a town within a city, filled with gift shops selling embroidery, calligraphy brushes and souvenirs on a cobblestone street lined with pojangmacha, or outdoor food vendors, selling gimbap, rice cakes filled with meat and vegetables. If you’re searching for something more offbeat, a little digging will turn up the hipper side of Seoul—a one-night disco, say.  The artist Choi Jeong Hwa, known for his brightly colored inflatables and tchotchke-laden installations, organized such an event in the basement of C Space, a new experimental laboratory sponsored by a cosmetics company. Or if you want to get a taste of the type of art shown in Korea’s vibrant biennials—Kwangju and Busan both host biennials this month—Insa Art Space, an alternative venue sponsored by Arts Council Korea, recently partnered with New York’s New Museum on a show about the military base in Dongducheon, a small city near the dmz. This year, Insa turned its ground-floor gallery into a video lounge and coffee bar, a cool place to run into local artists as well as international curators.

For collectors wishing to explore the gallery scene in Seoul, there are two easy-to-navigate art districts: one on the city’s north side composed of the adjoining areas of Sagandong and Insadong, and the other to the south, comprising the neighborhood of Cheongdam-dong.  The two couldn’t be more different. Sagandong, which lies opposite the Gyeongbokgung Palace on the road to the Blue House, is filled with traditional Korean architecture of gray stone walls and tiled roofs, the streets lined with teahouses and fashion boutiques in addition to galleries. Here are found Seoul’s blue-chip dealers: Hyundai, PKM, Kukje and Arario; Gana, the other major international name, has its own compound in Pyeonchangdong, just a bit farther north.  In Sagandong, exhibitions of international talents like Joel Schapiro and Candida Höfer are as easy to find as are shows of such international Korean stars as Lee Bul and Cho Duck Hyun. 

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. 

The city’s top dealers have also developed its auction scene, fostering an unusual closeness with the auction houses that contrasts with the rivalry prevalent in Western capitals. To give contemporary art a higher profile in Seoul and to help the Korean art market recover after 1997’s financial crisis, Gana’s elder Lee founded Seoul Auction House in 1998.  “People weren’t able to sell their artworks because they couldn’t find anyone who wanted to buy,” he explains. “I thought the solution was to create an open market through the auction house, not so much for collectors as for dealers.” Last year, the house generated $104 million in sales. In 2005 one of its managers left to found a rival firm, K Auction, with funding from the family of Hyundai’s Myoung Ja Park; in 2007 K earned $67 million. The houses rack up these totals mainly through sales of modernist Korean painters like Park Sookeun, whose 1950 A Wash Place achieved a world record for a modern Korean work when it fetched $4.8 million at Seoul Auction in 2007. But they also handle the occasional major Western piece.

Despite such successes, the Korean art world has been shaken lately. This spring, Lee Kun-hee, the country’s top collector, was forced to resign from his position as the chairman of Samsung. Both for himself and for his company, Lee had assembled a massive trove of international blue-chip artists such as Francis Bacon, Hirst, Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol. Then this April he was charged with evading taxes by hiding billions of dollars in a slush fund and allegedly using some of that money to purchase $64 million worth of art for his personal use. Among the pieces cited in the allegation was Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Happy Tears, which was bought on behalf of Lee’s wife, Hong Ra-hee, at Christie’s in 2002 for $7.16 million. The scandal also forced Hong to resign from her position as director of the Leeum, Samsung Museum, Seoul’s only venue of international caliber. The affair cast a pall over the art scene for several months, and some big collectors were wary of making purchases while the investigation was under way. 

This mood was short-lived, however. Seoul Auction’s one-day sale in March made $15 million, causing waves of relief in the art world. “New collectors began to emerge,” reports Alice Lung, who does marketing for the house. “The press made sure that everyone knew about Lichtenstein’s Happy Tears, and this inadvertently led people to believe that art is an alternative investment.” For the city’s dealers and auctioneers alike, the next project is to get more than a handful of Korean artists onto the international art world’s radar—and to nurture them at home as well as abroad. In recent years, Seoul has produced its share of global stars, including video artist Kim Sooja, but they were mostly educated outside Korea and established their careers elsewhere.

To help promote his country’s cultural galaxy, Bong Lee opened the Gana annex in New York with a solo show of photographs by Bae Bien-U that featured haunting black-and-white shots of forests and followed this with an exhibition of Yong Ho Ji’s animals carved out of used tires. The idea was that both events would appeal to local buyers and give the artists an international cachet that would also burnish their reputations at home.

Perhaps ironically for a city whose charm derives in part from offering a slower pace than Beijing or Shanghai, Seoul’s market is largely being shaped by the soaring popularity of China’s artworks. “We are benefiting from the boom in Chinese contemporary art,” says Bong Lee, “because now that those prices have gone so high, people are avidly looking for Korean contemporary art.”

"On Solid Ground" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.