Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf SEOUL 2022 (hereafter Kiaf) from September 2 through 6, 2022, in COEX, Samseong-dong. Staged concurrently as a partnership, approximately 300 galleries will convene in the vibrant cosmopolitan city of Seoul for both art fairs. In the past two years there has been a remarkable surge of interest in collecting in Korea, making Seoul the most dynamic venue for viewing art in Asia. The collaboration between Kiaf and Frieze, the two most influential art fairs in their respective regions, is expected to further stimulate the region's art market and nurture the culture of collecting in Korea and beyond.      Frieze Seoul   The inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul will bring together approximately 110 galleries from all over the world. Since last year, the announcement of Frieze’s five-year-long partnership with the Galleries Association of Korea (the organizer of Kiaf) became a point of spirited debate in the domestic art market. Frieze Seoul is the fifth in the Frieze franchise, along with Frieze London (since 2003), Frieze Masters and Frieze New York (since 2012), and Frieze Los Angeles (since 2019).  The four-day event, spearheaded by Frieze Seoul Director Patrick Lee and open from September 2 through 5, 2022, will feature three sections: Main, devoted to galleries showcasing contemporary art; Masters, led by Frieze Masters Director Nathan Clements-Gillespie and including works from collectible objects to significant masterpieces from the Old Masters to the late 20th century; and Focus Asia, a new section curated by Christopher Y. Lew (Chief Artistic Director of Horizon Art Foundation and Outland) and Hyejung Jang (Curator of Doosan Art Center and independent curator), showcasing ten solo presentations of artists from Asian galleries. In addition to the fair, an expanded Frieze Week program of exhibitions and events across the city will commence on August 29, encompassing a broad spectrum of programming in galleries, museums, and artist studios, celebrating the rich cultural scene in Seoul along with the primacy of the occasion.   For Frieze Seoul, Kukje Gallery will showcase a wide variety of important works by critically acclaimed Korean and international modern and contemporary artists, with a special focus on Korea’s most celebrated artists. The highlight of the selection will be an important piece by Kim Whanki titled Tranquility 5-IV-73 #310 (1973). Created in New York just one year before the artist’s passing, Tranquility 5-IV-73 #310 was one of the last works done in the brilliant blue color for which Kim was widely admired. This painting was featured in many of Kim’s retrospectives and was even mentioned in the artist’s personal diary. The pictorial plane is permeated with a seemingly infinite number of dots surrounded by layers of square borders, evoking stars scattered across two overlapping galaxies.  The booth will also include Mountain (1973) by Yoo Youngkuk, one of the founders of Korean abstract painting and a contemporary of Kim Whanki, best known for his vibrant vocabularies that distilled Korean naturalism into a formal vocabulary consisting of point, line, plane, and color. Closed on August 21, Kukje Gallery had just held a retrospective marking the 20th anniversary of Yoo’s death—held across all three spaces of Kukje Gallery Seoul—the presentation of this iconic work at the booth highlights the importance of the artist’s work in Korean contemporary art history, for both local and international art enthusiasts.  Along with Yoo Youngkuk, the gallery’s booth will also highlight works by Korean Dansaekhwa masters who forged unique ideas on abstraction and have left an enduring imprint on Korean modern and contemporary art history. This includes Écriture (描法) No. 071130 (2007) by Park Seo-Bo, who is the subject of a comprehensive monograph titled Park Seo-Bo: Écriture, recently published by the leading international art publisher Rizzoli. The selection also includes Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 17-301 (2017), a powerful example of the artist’s internationally celebrated technique of bae-ap-bub, a singular method of pushing paint from the back of the canvas to the front. Closed on August 24, Ha’s solo exhibition at Palazzetto Tito in Venice was on view as an official Collateral Event of the Biennale Arte 2022, featuring a curated selection of approximately thirty works from the artist’s past six decades, and introducing the full range of his material experimentation and conceptual rigor. Also on view will be works by a wide range of Korean contemporary artists including Kibong Rhee’s new painting Black shadow ᅳ The void (2022), a dreamlike representation of natural elements such as water, fog, and trees on polyester fiber and canvas; and Suki Seokyeong Kang’s Mat 120 × 165 #22-31 (2021-2022), a contemporary adaptation of a Korean floor mat called a hwamunseok, on which the traditional solo court dance chunaengmu is performed. Kang’s Mat series is characterized by a meticulously woven reed mat delicately embellished with subtle geometric patterns, seen behind the narrow bars of a linear steel frame. The booth will also introduce Sungsic Moon’s Just Life (2022), a new work from the artist’s series of large-scale rose paintings that employ his signature technique of scratching and drawing directly onto wet oil paint.  These works by some of today's most important Korean artists will be exhibited alongside those by widely recognized international artists, including Nœud Sauvage (Wild Knot) (2020) by the French contemporary artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. Recently exhibited in the artist’s major solo exhibition Jean-Michel Othoniel: Treasure Gardens (closed on August 7), held across the Seoul Museum of Art and Deoksugung Palace Garden, this work belongs to one of Othoniel’s signature series of mirrored glass sculptures that take the form of Borromean knots—a form based on complex mathematical interpretations and algebraic topology that form serpentine lines, dynamic and tumultuous curves, and infinite loops in a quasi-calligraphic gesture.    Kukje Gallery’s presentation for Frieze Seoul will also devote a special section of the booth to highlight the contemporary artist Haegue Yang. Featuring a range of works by the world-renowned artist, this section presents a concise overview of Yang’s diverse practice. The display includes Sonic Rotating Whatever Running on Hemisphere #19 (2022), a new wall-hanging sculpture covered with stainless steel bells and water taps that generate unique visual patterns and acoustics when manually activated. After the recent closings of her solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark and commission project Sonic Rescue Ropes (2022) for M+, Hong Kong, in the first half of the year, the artist will participate in a suite of highly anticipated institutional exhibitions and biennales including M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Smart Museum of Art at The University of Chicago, Okayama Art Summit, and Singapore Biennale during the second semester. Yang has also been selected as the subject of upcoming solo exhibitions at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil, and S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, both slated for the beginning of next year.