Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, who passed away in 2014, is most remembered for his "Today" series, which the artist started on Jan. 4, 1964. The monochromatic canvas shows only the date inscribed in white. Some dates may have been personally significant to the artist and some may have been historically significant. It took roughly eight hours for Kawara to finish each painting, and if it w...

The inaugural Frieze Seoul last year, which took place alongside Korea International Art Fair (KIAF), attracted huge attention from home and abroad. The combined sales of the two art fairs were estimated to be almost half the size of the Korean art market in the first half of 2022, according to the English-language report “Korea Art Market 2022." All eyes are on the second Frieze Seoul scheduled...

“I started to work with bleached denim, partly due to the idea of its relationship to Western globalism, specifically America. I heard the saying that the first minute you paint on canvas you enter a Western history, and I am always aware that being a contemporary artist, everywhere in the world, we, as a non-Westerner, engage in something that is other than us, and then it becomes us,” he said. ...

Growing up with a hairdresser father, the fashion designer created the work “Vanitas” by transplanting natural hair one by one onto silicone spheres coated with artificial skin, seemingly illustrating the cycle of human life from childhood to elderly age through hair color. The faces are concealed. The show moves on to a different country after the Seoul run through March 26, according to the mu...

The winner of the grand prize, to be announced in January, will be awarded 20 million won ($15,600) and granted a solo exhibition at a newly built gallery building run by the Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Two works by the grand prize winner will become part of the collections at the Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation and the Seoul Museum of Art. Founded in 1989 by th...

Amid increasing global attention on the South Korean art market, where trade volume surpassed the trillion won ($784 million) mark this year for the first time, a recent report showed that the art boom in South Korea peaked in the third quarter of last year with a slowed-down phase ahead. Seoul National University recently published its first English-language report on the country’s art market, ...

She had an exhibition at Murmurs Gallery in Los Angeles in 2021 with the same title. The artwork “Meju (Dictee),” which shows bricks of meju, was created following the actual method of making meju. She mixed soybeans with texts from the book “Dictee” by Korean female avant-garde artist Cha Hak-kyung (1951-1982), which was printed on hanji, or traditional mulberry paper. At Gallery Shilla, she is...

Also on display is the film “Lonely Trees” by the Rojava Film Commune. A collective of grassroots filmmakers founded in 2015, the group is based in Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria. The 43-minute film describes the long tradition of oral histories in the Euphrates region, focusing on Kurdish people and their folk music as a means to protect their identity. The exhibitio...

The Yeol Korean Heritage Preservation Society, a private foundation dedicated to Korean craftsmanship, has forged a five-year partnership with French luxury fashion house Chanel to support Korean traditional artisans and their craftsmanship. The partnership aims to host the annual “The Artisan of the Year and Young Craftsman of the Year” together, a project that Yeol has held since 2013 to raise...

By Park Yuna (yunapark@heraldcorp.com)

A photography exhibition titled “Changing Asia – New Normal” will open in Hong Kong on Dec. 9, co-organized by China Daily and Asia News Network. It was held in Bangkok on Nov. 16, coinciding with Bangkok's successful hosting of a key meeting of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation economies. The exhibition has attracted 179 photographers from 18 countries, with 1,175 images submitted. Mr. Zhou Li -...

Published in 1932, the poem was written during the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) when the poet observed the Mitsukoshi Department Store, a Japanese department store, in Seoul. Launched in October 2021, No. 9 Cork Street is Frieze’s first permanent exhibition space for international galleries to present artists from around the world and their programs. The exhibitions of the Korean artists ru...

Walking out of the space by parting the draped curtain, you will see a painting, “Window-Dream,” that connotes an overlapped sense of time. A corroded copper plate bears the traces of passage of time as if the artist wanted to reflect different times of the past, present and future on it. The exhibition runs through Jan. 29, 2023. By Park Yuna (yunapark@heraldcorp.com)

Meanwhile, Thai contemporary artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, represented by Kukje Gallery since April 2021, has joined the list for the first time, ranking at 88. Arunanondchai's first solo exhibition with Kukje Gallery, titled “Image, Symbol, Prayer,” will open Dec. 15. Meanwhile Korea-born Swiss-German philosopher and academic Han Byung-chul came in at 48th place. He continues his tenure as a p...

Rhee has been attracted to fog and water as motifs in his paintings. At the exhibition in 2003 at Kukje Gallery, “There is No Place -- The Connective,” the artist presented a water tank filled with blue liquid, from which his interest gradually evolved into fog and vapor. The artist chose the words “phantom” or “abyss” in explaining his works at the exhibition and said the concept is underpins t...