Frieze Seoul Comes Back to COEX One Last Time

Frieze Seoul returns to the COEX convention centre in Gangnam from September 2 to 5, 2026, running in the same week — and the same building — as Kiaf Seoul, which extends through September 6. The two fairs sharing a roof and a calendar is by now the whole point of "Seoul Art Week": one blue-chip international fair, one long-running Korean one, and a city's worth of gallery and museum programming timed to overlap with both. This edition carries a bit of extra weight, too, since Frieze has already confirmed that 2027 will see the fair relocate to the Dongdaemun Design Plaza — Zaha Hadid's cavernous, neofuturist landmark on the other side of the city — making this September the last time Frieze Seoul unfolds inside COEX's more conventional halls.

The gallery roster reads like a standard Frieze mix, which is itself worth noting for how unremarkable it now looks in Seoul specifically: Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, David Zwirner, White Cube, Lisson and Sprüth Magers are confirmed alongside Lehmann Maupin, sitting next to a strong bench of Seoul and regional galleries — Kukje Gallery, PKM Gallery, Gallery Baton and Hakgojae from Seoul, Kaikai Kiki, Taka Ishii and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP from Tokyo, and Tang Contemporary Art and Asia Art Center representing wider Asian markets. Five years ago that international-versus-local split would have been the story. Now it barely registers as one, which says something about how settled Seoul's position in the fair circuit has become.

On the artist side, the fair has flagged major presentations from Do Ho Suh, Koo Jeong A, Yayoi Kusama, Damien Hirst, Glenn Ligon and Lee Bae — a roster that leans toward artists with existing, deep ties to Korea (Do Ho Suh, Koo Jeong A, Lee Bae) as much as international names with market pull (Kusama, Hirst). It's a pairing that fits the fair's two newer curated sections. Material Practice, curated by Hyeyoung Cho, is built specifically around the exchange between contemporary art and Korean craft and heritage — a section that could easily read as thematic packaging elsewhere but has real substance in a city with living lacquer, ceramics and textile traditions to draw on. Spotlight, the fair's other new section, is given over to solo presentations of twentieth-century artists, the kind of historical grounding that's often the first thing cut when a fair is under pressure to feel current.

The programming built to run alongside the booths is where Frieze Seoul is doing its more interesting work this year. The LIVE programme includes a project from British artist Ryan Gander called The Find Seoul, which scatters roughly 16,000 collectible artworks across the city for the public to discover — less an installation than a citywide scavenger hunt, and a genuinely unusual way to get a fair's programming out past its own paid perimeter. Frieze Film, separately, is collaborating with the Busan Biennale this year, a cross-institutional pairing that extends the fair's reach beyond Seoul to Korea's other major biennial city. And the 2026 Frieze Seoul Artist Award has gone to Yagwang, a Seoul-based art collective rather than a single name — a choice that tracks with a broader curatorial appetite this year for collective and process-driven practice over solo market stars.

For anyone reading this with an interior or spatial-design eye rather than a strictly art-market one, the two things worth actually planning around are the Material Practice section — given its direct engagement with craft, material and Korean design heritage, the closest thing the fair has to a design-adjacent programme — and the venue question itself. COEX is a functional, unglamorous exhibition hall; Dongdaemun Design Plaza, where the fair heads next year, is one of the more argued-about pieces of contemporary architecture in the city, all curved aluminium panelling and no straight lines, and pairing that space with a major art fair for the first time in 2027 is likely to change the character of the event in ways worth watching from a design standpoint alone.

None of this is confirmed to extend to citywide luxury or design-brand activations the way Frieze week does in London or Miami — nothing on that front has been announced as of this writing, and it's not worth speculating about names until galleries and brands confirm their own programming closer to September. What is confirmed is enough on its own: two overlapping fairs, a genuinely citywide public art project, a craft-focused new section, and a venue about to change for the first time in the fair's history. Worth building a September trip around, if travel and design intersect on your calendar this year.