The art world landed in Seoul this week for the inaugural edition of Frieze in Asia as the vibrant South Korean capital seeks to position itself as the region’s next art hub.

Previous Frieze fairs have taken place in traditional arts capitals like London, Paris and New York, but industry experts say Seoul was a natural choice for the first Asian edition of the prestigious event.

South Korea has emerged as a cultural powerhouse in recent years with the global success of Oscar-winning film Parasite and Netflix series Squid Game, as well as K-pop superstars BTS sweeping the Billboard music charts .

“Frieze looks for cities where culture is highly valued,” Patrick Lee, the founding director of Frieze Seoul, told AFP.

Seoul boasts a rich arts scene, he added, with “incredibly talented artists, world-class museums, corporate collections, non-profit organizations, biennials, and galleries that make it an ideal location for an art fair.”

The fair also comes at a time when the art world is turning its back on Hong Kong – long thought to be the hub of the lucrative Asian art market – due to looming financial and political uncertainties, as well as quarantine restrictions still being imposed on visitors.

“Seoul is definitely the most vibrant and exciting market in Asia right now,” said Alice Lung, director of Galerie Perrotin, which opened its second gallery in Seoul last month.

Tim Schneider, art business editor of Artnet News, said the openings of major Western galleries such as Pace, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Thaddaeus Ropac, followed by Frieze, confirmed that Seoul had “risen” on the international art scene.

“Frieze Seoul is just final confirmation that the demand was there,” he told AFP.

The local art market has seen explosive growth since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with local art fairs seeing record attendance and sales over the past year.

“When the borders were closed for a while, people focused on online viewing,” Lung of Gallery Perrotin told AFP.

“This helped Korean artists and galleries to grow faster without physical constraints and attract new collectors,” she said, especially Millennials and Gen Z.

During this time, skyrocketing real estate prices prompted many young South Koreans to seek alternative investment opportunities such as stocks, cryptocurrency and, for some, artworks.

“Many young people experienced bitter losses from stock and crypto investments, and artworks seemed like a safe bet, especially after high-profile success cases,” said Hwang Dal-seung, president of the Galleries Association of Korea.

The late Samsung CEO Lee Kun-hee left a trove of antiques and artworks – including works by Claude Monet, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso – that are reportedly worth two to three trillion won (US$1.5 billion to US$2.2 billion). dollars) and had appreciated greatly in value during his decades of ownership, Hwang added.

Schneider said South Korea is a “microcosm of Asia” in terms of the rise of collectors born after 1980 who are having a strong impact on the market today.

“Buyers from this age group and this region have reshaped the hierarchy of which artists are most in demand internationally, and significantly increased the speed at which artists can move from the emerging tier to blue-chip awards and global fame,” he added added.

According to a July report by the state-run Korea Arts Administration Service, the country’s art market was valued at around 532.9 billion won in the first half of 2022 — more than all of 2021.

Thaddaeus Ropac, who opened his gallery in Seoul last year, said South Korea offers a balanced demographic of collectors.

“You have very established collectors who are not too young anymore and have incredible experience and who have been collecting art for 30 or 40 years and you see the results, which I think are quite amazing in quality,” Ropac told AFP .

“But then you also sense a whole fresh new approach to art” from younger collectors, he added.

The Austrian gallery owner, who began collaborating with South Korean artists nearly two decades ago, said the country’s art scene — artists, curators, collectors — was “built up over generations.”

The arrival of Frieze Seoul would certainly open new doors for South Korea’s art market, he said, but it was “also a result of what Seoul has become.”

Schneider added: “Historically, every time a world-class international fair opens in a new city, it also confirms that the art market infrastructure there is sustainable.”

However, he declined to place Seoul’s rise in relation to Hong Kong’s possible fall.

“I think it is misguided to pretend that Asia – a vast continent made up of numerous countries with unique cultural histories and enormous wealth – cannot support two legitimate art market centers,” he said.