Kicking off the September art fair calendar, Frieze Seoul returns to the South Korean capital alongside the country’s first international art fair, Kiaf SEOUL, for Seoul Art Week, and the city’s vibrant art scene is ready to activate with a rich program of gallery and museum exhibitions you won’t want to miss. Most major events across the city will be on Hannam Night (September 3), Samcheong Night (September 4) and Cheongdam Night (September 5), with the requisite after-parties to follow, though plenty of the must-see shows run through the end of the month or even the end of the year. Observer pored over the Seoul Art Week schedule and put together a list of exhibitions art lovers visiting Seoul for the fairs should prioritize in their off hours.
Myriu Yoon and Astrid Terrazas at Foundry Seoul
Foundry rapidly made its name in the international art scene with its exciting program. During Seoul Art Week, the gallery will have on view a fascinating exhibition presenting thirty-three new paintings by Korean artist Miryu Yoon set against the backdrop of wetlands. Titled “Do Wetlands Scare You?” the show is inspired by those liminal spaces, “a place where the ground is sunken and always filled with water.” Wetlands are vital habitats for a wide variety of plants and animals, but at the same time, they function as powerful metaphors for a specific psychological and symbolic space. Figurative in the way they portray friends and peers captured with the iPhone Live Photos feature, Yoon’s paintings also become symbolic and more abstract intermediaries of sensations and archetypes the artist seeks to explore while interacting with local myths and folklore. The gallery is also presenting for the first time in South Korea the work of Queens-based artist Astrid Terrazas. Similarly dense with symbolism and tapping into ancestral archetypes, Terrazas’s works link with distinctive Mexican ancestral folklore, blending it with her own lived experiences and unearthly transfiguration. Titled “Los Rostros Falsos,” the show presents the artist’s universe, a visual dream diary full of transient figures, archaic symbols and chimerical narratives. This new body of work by the artist explores the complexities of the menstrual cycle with a series of allegories and symbolic figurations that connect the female body and its ancestral wild energies with the broader universe of nature.