Frieze Seoul Award-Winners Dismantle the Fair Stand

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When Frieze Seoul opens tomorrow for its first full day of public access, visitors will have the opportunity to peruse the booths of more than 130 galleries—and, thanks to Seoul-based visual art collective Yagwang—one reimagined vision of the traditional art fair stand.

The duo, made up of Terri Kim and In Jeon, were announced in June as the winners of the fourth edition of the Frieze Seoul Artist Award, which recognises mid-career Korean artists.  Together, under a name that translates to glow-in-the-dark, they explore queer narratives and themes of gender, human rights, labour and subcultures.

Their Frieze Seoul commission, Facade Zone (2026), is a site-specific sculptural installation in which the white-walled structure of the booth is stripped away, revealing the mechanisms of display. “Facade Zone started from re-reading and extending the conditions of the wall a fair gives you,” a joint email from the pair explained.

“We thought that if we hollowed the wall out and let light enter the gaps that opened up, it might stop being a wall in a linear dimension and become a structure that keeps expanding and changing. A booth is a fixed allotment of space that stays exactly as it is for several days. We wanted to put something inside it that keeps moving and stays unpredictable.”

Kim and Jeon, both of whom used to work on film sets, took their inspiration for Facade Zone from the unseen labour of movie-making: the sets built and quickly dismantled, the scenes cut before ever being watched and the unseen workers who spend hours toiling behind cameras.

In film, as in exhibition-making, the concealment of these mechanisms of production is often considered a marker of a job well done. “The better a display is built, the more thoroughly it erases itself,” the pair wrote.

“For us, then, revealing isn’t a matter of exposing anything. It’s closer to building a condition where the time and movement that were already there, and that nobody looked at, can be held.”

To achieve this, the duo have removed the walls of one of Frieze’s stands, revealing the wooden frame that supports the structure. Inside, latex sculptures and figures drawn from Korean Buddhist iconography are lit by a specially designed, continuously changing lighting rig.

Latex, a material often used by Kim and Jeon during their time in film production, was selected for its likeness to skin. The way the rubber stretches, covers and peels makes it a useful stand-in for the human form—and, like the human form, it discolours, hardens and decomposes over time.

The chosen Buddhist elements, however, created in gold leaf, explore the opposite. The pair’s email explained: “What we were curious about, in the end, was the condition of an iconography made to depict eternity running in the opposite direction from a material moving slowly and continuously toward its own death.”

Both conflicting elements are, thanks to the installation’s lighting, in a constant state of change. Each of Facade Zone’s lights is battery-operated, and “a simple performance” of replacing them takes place twice a day—as the light weakens, the length of the shadows and the colour of the latex surface shifts.

The manual changing of the work’s batteries isn’t, Yagwang explained, “meant as anything remarkable”, but it does make visible the mechanisms and the labour alluded to by their stripped-back stand. “It’s simply what the work needs in order to breathe, the way a person needs someone else’s care and hands to keep living,” they wrote. “We wanted that to be inside the work as well.”

Kim and Jeon began working together as Yagwang in 2021. Their first solo exhibition, Lubricant (2022), also utilised latex, alongside projection, performance and chains, to reconstruct queer memories. In 2025 they presented the performance Raw Proof as part of Frieze Seoul’s live programme.