Kiaf Art Fair Blends Old and New in Forward-Looking Platform
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With the launch of a new satellite fair and a partnership with Frieze to host the inaugural Frieze Seoul, this year's edition of Kiaf involves some major changes.

In addition to Kiaf SEOUL, which takes place from 3 to 6 September 2022 and features 164 galleries from 17 countries and territories, the fair's organisers, the Galleries Association of Korea, are launching the satellite fair Kiaf PLUS with an emphasis on experimental and new media art, including NFTs.

Whilst Kiaf PLUS will feature many emerging galleries and artists, works by artists in their early 40s or younger can certainly be encountered across gallery booths at Kiaf SEOUL. Among the nine artists presented by G Gallery is Huh Suyon, who primarily works with paper paste made from Korean paper, or hanji, and discarded materials.

Her Quarantine (2022), featuring a bouquet of paper-paste flowers encased in a glass box, evokes the ambivalence of isolation in the age of the pandemic, in which physical contact becomes undesirable and quarantine becomes almost expected and encouraged.

At Baik Art, Jakarta-based artist Atreyu Moniaga will show recent watercolour paintings that continue his experimentation with colour and densely populated, surrealist worlds filled with different creatures.

True to its title, Dive To Blue (2022) takes a deep dip into an underwater ecosystem featuring aquatic life that look familiar enough—eels and whales—but also sun-like creatures with many eyes, dragons, and floating faces.

Ora-Ora, participating in Kiaf SEOUL for the first time, will present works by Peng Jian, Huang Dan, Juri Marrula, and Stephen Thorpe. Peng Jian's acrylic painting Harmony 161222006 (2022) explores the relationship between the two and three dimensions, consisting of tightly fitted puzzle pieces that dissolve into and emerge from Rubik's Cubes. Peng has also used the 'Harmony' series to expand his previously ink-based practice, working with acrylic painting and NFTs.

Whilst Kiaf PLUS will feature many emerging galleries and artists, works by artists in their early 40s or younger can certainly be encountered across gallery booths at Kiaf SEOUL.

Despite the recent decline in the market, NFTs appear to remain a central interest at Kiaf. Its own satellite art fair, Kiaf PLUS, will focus on younger galleries and 'new media art and art NFTs that are less commonly presented at art fairs'. These include PINK DESSERT (2022), a single-channel video by KUN at Keumsan Gallery, that shows a smiling cat in a dreamlike environment of pastel blue and flying whales in the sky.

The second edition of We Connect, Art & Future, Kiaf and INCHEON AIRPORT, a special exhibition organised in collaboration with the Incheon International Airport, will also feature NFTs in over 60 works on view.

Hanuk Jung's Blues for a Red Planet (2022), presented by Seojung Art, comes in both its NFT and original painted form, which evokes turbulent waves through the accumulation of thickly applied paint and white, undulating lines in the background.

Among other NFTs at the Airport will be Cody Choi's Database Painting, Animal Totem, Tigers 22080303330 (1999–2022), presented by PKM Gallery, based on the artist's earlier digital paintings. In 1997, Choi created his first database paintings by overlapping data images on the computer, then an unfamiliar genre of art in Korea.

Recent works in the more traditional medium also remain a major presence at gallery booths. Axel Vervoordt Gallery is showing a solo booth of Kimsooja's installations, sculptures, and photographic prints, including Deductive Object (2022).

Deductive Object is an ovoid sculpture that Kimsooja conceived as a bottari (a Korean word for a bundle of objects that is wrapped in a piece of clothing, often for travel) and a body combined, suggesting a totality that alludes to birth and death. Its black form is inspired by the brahmanda stone (cosmic egg), which in Indian ritual traditions is polished until the surface becomes reflective. Suspended above a mirror, Deductive Object absorbs ambient light in the absence of spatial depth.

Artworks at Arario Gallery encompass the past few decades with Ryu In's Air of Darkness (1989), a bronze sculpture of a mutating human torso.

Revistalising the figure at a time when abstraction and installation dominated sculpture in Korea, Ryu In's work is one among many historical avant-garde pieces on view, emphasising the continuum of forward-looking art as platformed by Kiaf. —[O]