Earlier this year, Rajaratnam announced that she would leave her role as partner at Mnuchin Gallery after 15 years. During her tenure there, she was known for staging groundbreaking exhibitions of artists who had long been overlooked by the mainstream art world, including Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Alma Thomas, Betty Blayton, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and David Hammons, whose five-decade retrospective in 2016 is still on one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the elusive artist ever mounted. In the process, she also helped to build up markets for these artists.

In a statement, White Cube founder Jay Jopling said, “I have closely followed Sukanya’s exhibition programming over the past years and consider her to be one of the most outstanding market-makers in the art world. I am delighted that she has chosen to join White Cube and I look forward very much to working with her.”

Based in New York, Rajaratnam’s new role, according to a release, “will focus on market-making and exhibition-making” across White Cube’s various locations, which currently includes permanent ones in London, Hong Kong, and Paris, as well a seasonal West Palm Beach space.

In a statement, Rajaratnam said, “I admire the curatorial integrity that White Cube brings to its artists and estates and am excited to be able to contribute to that across a global platform. We may be at an inflection point in the market and I believe it is imperative for galleries to add value through exhibition programming and content.”

White Cube will also open its first New York location later this year and hired Courtney Willis Blair, a former partner at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, to lead the space last November. Located at 1002 Madison Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side, the space’s inaugural exhibition, organized by Willis Blair, will be titled “Chopped & Screwed.” Exploring “the idea of distortion as both a formal and conceptual tool used to examine and subvert well-established narratives or systems,” per a release, the show will include work by artists like Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Christian Marclay, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

In addition to news of Rajaratnam’s hiring, White Cube also announced that it will expand to Seoul, which was first reported by the Financial Times. Citing the success of the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul last September, the new ground-floor, 3,230 square-foot space will consist of exhibition spaces, a viewing room, and offices. Located in the capital city’s Gangnam-gu district, it will be in the same building as the private museum Horim Art Centre, which focuses on Korean antiquities and modern art.

In the past two years, numerous Western galleries have expanded to Seoul, including Gladstone, Esther Schipper, Perrotin, and Thaddaeus Ropac, which recently announced that it will add another floor to its Seoul location. Two galleries, Pace and Lehmann Maupin, that had established presences in the city slightly earlier also recently grew their footprint. And in March, the Centre Pompidou confirmed rumors that it would open a branch in Seoul, tentatively scheduled to open in 2025.

The exhibition “Goodbye in Seoul,” was originally scheduled to be on display for a week. It included 80 artworks, among them two satirical depictions of the politician. In one painting, the head of state is shown nude and wielding a sword hovering over a city, in a mode similar to Goya’s Colossus. In another work, Yoon is recast as a version of the main character in the 2022 film Decision to Leave. The work’s title, Decision to Embezzle, refers to Yoon’s controversial pardoning of the state’s former’s president, Lee Myung-bak, who was convicted on charges related to financial fraud.

The show was jointly organized by the Seoul branch of the Federation of Artistic and Cultural Organization of Korea and the Goodbye Exhibition Organizing Committee. The groups combined input from lawmakers and politicians associated with the Democratic Party of Korea.

The National Assembly Secretariat issued multiple notices to the organizers of the exhibition requesting permission to remove the artworks, according to a report by ArtAsiaPacific. The office said the event was not in compliance with rules around the government building’s use. The standard stipulates that events “deemed potentially violating individual rights, public morals, and social ethics,” and otherwise engaged in “slandering,” are not permitted.

MMCA director Youn Bum-Mo addressed the report’s findings, which relate to art acquisitions and revenue spending, in a press conference on Tuesday. He said he would use the report’s findings, which allege 16 counts of illegality, to “improve” the museum.

According to the ministry, the state-backed museum failed to comply with a set of standards guiding art acquisitions and misappropriated government funding to pay employees.

The agency’s rules stipulate that proposals from curators and outside advisers selected by director must be used to oversee the acquisitions of artwork to the museum’s collection. The ministry’s rules further detail that up to 50 outside experts be used when deciding on art purchased. The audit, however, found that the institution cut down that number of external specialists to 11 in 2021.

A representative for the museum did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

Youn, who took up the position in 2019, replaced the museum’s former director, Bartomeu Mari. A former art critic, Youn has emphasized promoting Korean art internationally.

The report comes as the museum gears up for collaborations abroad. The institution plans to collaborate with the Guggenheim Museum in New York on an upcoming exhibition around South Korean experimental art made during the 1960s to the 1970s. The show will go on view in Seoul in May and travel to New York in September.

The agency found that 9 percent of the nearly 280 works of art the MMCA proposed for purchase last year were not done via advice provided by outside experts who could weigh in on the purchase price. The report found that sums for artworks were adjusted to higher values than those proposed by external appraisers.

The director told the Korean Herald, however, that this is standard practice in order to negotiate the purchase price with sellers. He explained saying the appraisal committee often sets the market value figure at 50 percent of the seller’s asking price, so adjustments are sometimes required.

Acquisition budgets for public museum collections in the country are known to be small.

The audit claims that there were issues related to three committees that oversee the museum’s art purchases. One committee discusses the artworks’ value; another designates its appropriate purchase price and the third finalizes the appraisal process before a work is bought. The audit found that the committee members influenced decision-making across the three groups, compromising their ability to operate independently of one another.

It also alleges that auction purchases of works were not properly overseen. Only a handful of around eight curators were informed of those public purchase opportunities, the agency reported. Some 35 percent of the museum’s 115 acquisition proposals were carried out without required documentation assessing the work’s market value, the report found.

The MMCA also allocated 32 million won ($25,000) in revenue from museum facilities spanning cafeterias, parking lots, and gift shops to pay employees bonuses last September. A national property law in Korea stipulates that the MMCA Foundation must pay back the leftover annual funds after income and expenses are calculated back to the government.

The audit found that the museum, which operates as a public foundation, also violated rules around the use of private contractors. The agency found that the museum hired a private contractor to help mount an exhibition dedicated to the high-profile collection of Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee’s collection instead of seeking general bids for the contractor work as required.

In a statement, the agency said the move “hindered the transparency” of the museum’s financial decisions.

The Headlines

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has tapped Matthew Hargraves to be its director. Hargraves has been with the Wadsworth since June 2021, when he joined as interim chief curator, after being chief curator of art collections at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. Tom Loughman stepped down as director and CEO in April of 2021, and in November, the Hartford Courant reports, the museum split the position into two jobs. (Jeffrey N. Brown took on the CEO role.) “With an extraordinarily committed and professional staff and an exceptional senior leadership team, we can reaffirm the Wadsworth’s rightful position as the leading arts institution in our region,” Hargraves said in a statement, “and reassert its international reputation as North America’s most pioneering art museum.”

ART AND LABOR. Workers at the Baltimore Museum of Art voted to unionize on Thursday, the Baltimore Business Journal reports. The vote was 89 to 29 to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Over in Pennsylvania, staffers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a rally on Wednesday amid contract negotiations, the Art Newspaper reports. Employees have been without a contract since unionizing in 2020. And Artforum reports that the Maryland Institute College of Art announced layoffs in the wake of a recent successful union vote. Around 10 percent of the union’s bargaining team is expected to be let go in the move. In a statement, MICA said that the restructuring is “a response to the short-term impact of the pandemic on enrollment as well as long-range strategic considerations.”

The Digest

Perrotin is taking a second space in Seoul, with plans to open in the metropolis’s luxe Gangnam neighborhood in early September. Gallery partner Alice Lung said that a Los Angeles outpost could be a “natural next step” for the international firm. [Financial Times]

Nightlife king Mark Fleischman, who owned the storied Studio 54 club in New York in the 1980s, died by assisted suicide in Switzerland on Wednesday. He was 82, and had a degenerative condition. “I have done everything and been everywhere and met everyone I want to meet,” he told the New York Post last month.
[BBC News and The Washington Post]

A court in Eastern Russian cleared artist and activist Yulia Tsvetkova of pornography charges for posting artworks on social media that her supporters say are efforts to promote body positivity. She had faced six year in prison. Prosecutors can appeal. [The Moscow Times]

A work by artist Yu Buck at the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang, South Korea, that involves goldfish slowly dying in IV bags drew animal-cruelty accusations, and the fish have been removed. Yu has framed the work as a commentary on the violence of human nature. [The Korea Times]

An exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno features photographs that Janna Ireland has taken of buildings by the pioneering Black architect Paul Revere Williams. [The New York Times]

David Zwirner toasted the one-anniversary of its online platform, Platform, with a party at the Bowery Hotel in New York. [Vogue]

The Kicker

TOUGH TALK. In a profile in Wallpaper, artist Cecilia Vicuña shared a harrowing story about feedback she received after pitching a show of her work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1970s. She said that ICA cofounder Roland Penrose told her, “You are a great artist, but my board is absolutely adamant that you should not have an exhibition here. They think that you are worthless. But be sure, you will encounter this throughout your life, but you have to know within yourself that that’s not true.” He ended up giving her a show in a hallway, and Vicuña is, of course, now one of the most widely exhibited artists on the planet. [Wallpaper]

The traveling exhibition for which the works were loaned, “Kandinsky, Malevich & Russian Avant-Garde,” is currently at its final stop in Korea at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, after going on view throughout Europe at the end of December. It will remain open as scheduled until April 17, according to the Korea Times, which first reported the news. 

Similar situations have arisen across Europe since Russia launched its war on Ukraine in late February.

In Milan, more than 20 works were loaned to a museum owned by Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo from the Russian state-backed network of Hermitage museums for an exhibition tilted “Grand Tour: The dream of Italy from Venice to Pompeii.” Additionally, two paintings were loaned to the city’s Palazzo Reale for its ‘Titian and the image of women in 16th century Venice” exhibition. Russia’s Ministry of Culture requested the return of those works and others in elsewhere in Italy, which those institutions have acquiesed to.

“When I read the letter I felt bitter because culture should be protected from war but these are difficult times,” Palazzo Reale director Domenico Piraina told Reuters earlier this month.

In Paris, the Foundation Louis Vuitton refused to close an exhibition dedicated to modern art from the holdings of late 19th century Russian collectors Mikhail and Ivan Abramovich Morozov, citing logistical obstacles related to the war. The collection is prized in Russia and was approved by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to be sent to France.

The Seoul exhibition features a range of Russian artists, from abstraction painters Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich to Natalia Goncharova and Alexander Rodchenko, whose works span photography and design. 

The showcase was the first to bring many key Russian art historical figures to public view in Korea. It drew support from Russian officials, including the Kremlin’s Korean ambassador Andrey Kulik, who praised the exhibition during an opening ceremony in Seoul in December. In his remarks, Kulik noted that cultural exchange has long forged links between the two countries. 

At the end of February, Kulik warned that ties made with Korea over the past 30 years could “change course,” in a statement after Seoul’s government announced it would join an international sanctions effort to punish the Russian Federation for its invasion in Ukraine. As part of the action, Seoul’s foreign ministry said it would bar export of key materials to Russia and freeze access to seven of Russia’s largest banks.

Gladstone Gallery—which has a trio of spaces in New York, one in Brussels, and an office in Los Angeles—has secured a location in the tony Gangnam district. An opening date has not yet been set.

“We are very happy to share the news that Gladstone will officially begin to expand its physical footprint to Asia,” the gallery’s founder, Barbara Gladstone, said in a statement. “We have a long history of artists showing at some of Korea’s most prestigious institutions, including a significant exhibition for Matthew Barney at the Leeum in 2005, and many more.”

The venture will be helmed by HeeJin Park, an alum of Seoul’s heavyweight Kukje Gallery who has worked for Gladstone out of South Korea for more than a year. “This is an exciting moment for the gallery and the greater Seoul art world,” Park said. “The Gangnam area of the city is a vibrant location with its own burgeoning art scene, so we are happy to embed ourselves into the fabric of this neighborhood at this significant moment of growth.”

The news comes as top-tier dealers from abroad have been racing to open and expand in the capital city. Next month, Thaddaeus Ropac is due to open in Hannam-dong, the same neighborhood where Pace just inaugurated a two-floor exhibition venue. König Galerie alighted earlier this year in an MCM store in Gangnam, which is also home to luxe art spaces operated by Louis Vuitton and Hermès. Other foreign outfits with Seoul locations include Perrotin, Lehmann Maupin, and Various Small Fires.

And then there is Frieze, the London art fair giant, which has said it will collaborate with the Galleries Association of Korea to start its first Asian fair next September at the COEX convention center, which is also in Gangnam.

Gladstone Gallery, which marked its 40th anniversary last year, has been in an expansionist mode of late. It christened its L.A office this summer, and took on the influential dealer Gavin Brown as a partner last year, bringing aboard a dozen of his artists. Its roster includes Ian Cheng, Carroll Dunham, Cyprien Gaillard, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Anicka Yi.

South Korea is a small country, about the size of Indiana, and half its residents live in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, which is roughly Los Angeles County with twice as many people, 25 million. As of 2019, that dense region boasted 100 art museums. Nationwide, they have been opening at a fast clip. Between 2008 and 2019, their number doubled, from 127 to 256, according to a report on the art sector put out annually by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and the Korea Arts Management Service, a government agency. About a quarter of those museums are national or public; the remainder are privately funded by universities or companies, which have become buyers in the Samsung mold (albeit at a smaller scale).

In 2017, beauty conglomerate Amorepacific (of Innisfree fame) opened a headquarters in Seoul, designed by David Chipperfield, which includes a vast exhibition space. Its CEO, Suh Kyung-bae (an ARTnews Top 200 Collector since 2016), has filled the Amorepacific Museum of Art with works by Sterling Ruby, Adam Pendleton, and Lee Bul, many fresh from the studio.

Art spaces have become a way for brands to compete. This past February, a million-square-foot Hyundai department store, with a dedicated exhibition space, began welcoming shoppers in the Yeouido district. (Fittingly, the business-art maestro Andy Warhol got the first show.) Retail rival Lotte has a museum of its own in its Lotte World mall, which opened in 2014, with the country’s tallest building soaring above it. A touring Basquiat show there recently drew more than 100,000 visitors, a big number even in non-pandemic times. The energy company Samtan is readying a new Herzog & de Meuron–designed headquarters in ultra-luxe Cheongdam—a striking, $52 million right triangle, 11 stories tall—that will house its closely watched SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation.

State-backed institutions have also stepped up. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) has opened two new branches in the last eight years. One was inaugurated in 2018 in Cheongju, a city of about 1 million an hour south of Seoul by train. The other arrived in the capital’s moneyed Samcheong neighborhood, in 2013. As part of the Lee family donation, the MMCA will receive north of 1,200 pieces, including its first Claude Monet and important canvases by Kim Whanki and Lee Jung-seop. More than 20,000 traditional Korean works, including dozens designated as National Treasures, will head to the National Museum of Korea, and other material would bolster the collections of regional museums. The donation includes art that almost no public museums in the world can now afford—and, conveniently, it removed those assets from the Lees’ tax bill; the hope in the art industry is that the donation could set an example for future patrons. (With Samsung’s de facto leader, Lee Jae-yong [Lee Kun-hee’s son], in prison for bribery, the donations also had the helpful benefit of generating some favorable press for the family.)

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul location of which is shown here, will receive more than 1,200 valuable artworks from the collection of Lee Kun-hee.

Seoul’s art scene has risen quickly. Until the 1980s, when a dictatorship gave way to democracy, only the most well-connected artists could get visas to travel abroad. The MMCA was founded in 1969, after a picketing campaign by artists, Soojung Kang, an MMCA curator, said through a translator, but its first purpose-built home opened only in 1986, just outside Seoul. (The MMCA has not emphasized collecting Western art—no public museum in Korea has it in great depth.) In 1995, government officials intent on boosting South Korea’s art world started the Gwangju Biennale, attracting global notice. Similar events followed in Busan (on the south coast) and Seoul, in 1998 and 2000. They align on the calendar in the fall every two years to draw the international art set.

In 1979, the Korea Galleries Association founded the annual Korea Galleries Art Fair, and a local bazaar was born. This past March, it drew 48,000 people, with visitors using apps to facilitate contact tracing, should a Covid outbreak make that necessary (it didn’t). “I’ve never seen so many people at that fair in my entire 20-year career,” said Emma Son, senior director at the Seoul branch of New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery. Sales were good too, the latest indicator of strong local demand. “I keep telling my colleagues, it feels like a revival of what happened back in 2007,” Son said of the bullish mood in the country. That preceded a crash, but this time, she said, “the market is a lot stronger.”

“In the 1990s, after the Seoul Olympics [which occurred in 1988], and after the globalization of South Korea, the art market became very active,” said Kang, the MMCA curator, “and there was also a great boom in the 2000s.” She will highlight the artists who forged the art scene before then, like Lee Kang-So and Lee Seung-taek, in “The Avant-Garde: Experimental Art in South Korea, in 1960s–1970s,” which is set to run in 2022 at the MMCA and the Guggenheim, whose Kyung An is co-curating. It’s the first major museum show to take up the subject beyond the Korean peninsula.

Lee Seung-taek, whose 1964 painting Untitled (Burning Canvases Floating on the River) is shown here, helped create an art scene in Seoul.

Blue-chip art dealers from abroad have taken notice of this activity and established beachheads in Seoul over the past five years. Attractive business rules provided encouragement: there’s no import duty on art, and no sales tax on items under 60 million South Korean won (about $55,000). The same goes for work made by living artists. Between 2016 and 2017, Lehmann Maupin, Emmanuel Perrotin, and Pace all took space in the city.

“The South Korean art market had been well developed ahead of many other Asian markets,” said the Paris-based Perrotin, who has helped guide the careers of Takashi Murakami and Paola Pivi. He rented in a building where Christie’s resides, in the Samcheong area, which is home to stalwart local galleries like Hyundai (now in its 51st year, and no relation to the department store: the name means “modern”) and Kukje, a short walk from the Blue House, the official residence of South Korea’s president.

Pre-pandemic, Perrotin visited Korea three or four times a year, and he added to his roster canonical post–Korean War painters like Park Seo-Bo and the late Chung Chang-Sup, whose stature and prices have risen abroad, alongside their peers in the Dansaekhwa (“Monochrome”) movement. The Seoul gallery became integral to Perrotin’s regional expansion plans. He’d opened in Hong Kong in 2012, and after Seoul, he launched in Tokyo and Shanghai. “With our experience there, we were well-equipped when entering other markets in Asia,” he said.

New York–based gallery Lehmann Maupin showed the work of artist Cecilia Vicuña in its five-year-old Seoul branch earlier this year.

Samcheong also attracted New York–based Lehmann Maupin, which had been showing the Korean stars Lee Bul and Do Ho Suh for years, and which has also maintained London and Hong Kong locations. “We had a very important base of Korean collectors,” cofounder Rachel Lehmann said. Before international travel halted, Seoul was a meeting point. “You would have Japanese collectors, you would have Chinese collectors who were coming, for example, to do a food trip,” she said.

Pace went with Hannam-dong, a chic haven for expats and the wealthy, and the site of the Leeum, which opened in 2004, with buildings by a trio of starchitects, Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel, and Rem Koolhaas. Pace began with a compact space tucked away in an office building. “I’d rather just start than build a temple to myself,” Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said. “But we did outgrow it.” In May, it opened a much larger, two-story venue across the street with paintings by African-American artist Sam Gilliam. Why Seoul? “Obviously, the history of collecting our artists in Korea is unquestionable,” Glimcher said, then continued, “we did have something to add, in a way that, like, in L.A., I feel I don’t have anything to add.”

Last year, New York dealer Barbara Gladstone hired HeeJin Park, a Kukje alum, to run a Seoul office and handle fairs around Asia. (The gallery has no plans to add a full-fledged exhibition space.) The powerful European dealer Thaddaeus Ropac plans to open a Seoul branch in October. This April, German power couple Johann and Lena König, who exhibit mid-career figures like Camille Henrot and Helen Marten, swung open the doors on a gallery that occupies the top floor and (selfie-ready) rooftop garden of fashion brand MCM’s building in Cheongdam. (The gallery previously had an MCM space in Tokyo that shuttered last year.) König’s ambassador in the city is Soo Choi, who will continue to run her four-year-old P21 gallery in two pocket-size storefronts in Itaewon. König’s entry comes as the “general audience and the collector base for contemporary art are constantly growing” in the country, Choi said.

“Until fairly recently, a lot of Korean collectors seldom knew about or traveled to the main international art fairs, or even local fairs,” Park said in an email.

It is not just deep-pocketed mega-galleries betting on the city. In 2019, Esther Kim Varet opened a branch of her Los Angeles gallery, Various Small Fires, in Hannam, where she’s been showing artists from her eclectic, American-focused roster, like Gina Beavers and Billy Al Bengston. Until Covid, she flew out for every opening. The modest-size venue now accounts for half her business, she said by video from L.A. “It’s kind of surprising.”

Varet’s parents emigrated from Korea to the United States, and kept a home in the city, so she visited regularly. But Seoul’s draw was about more than her family ties. The West Coast avant-garde looked to Asia, she pointed out, and the notion of a single market center is no longer valid. “Being in L.A., it makes for a much more natural jumping-off point to go into Korea for me than if I were to set up shop in New York,” she said.

An installation view of the inaugural exhibition at German dealers Johann and Lena König’s Seoul gallery.

South Korea has been spending money to promote the field, aiming to create, for art, the “Korean wave” (hallyu) enjoyed by Korean pop juggernauts like Blackpink and BTS. (As it happens, BTS’s leader, RM, is a huge art fan, and recently gave funds to the MMCA to republish out-of-print books.) And it is not just spending on biennials. Local artists can get grants to support projects in the country and beyond, and dealers can partake too. “If a young gallery like [mine] is going to Taipei Dangdai [an annual fair], we can apply for the funds,” Kyungmin Lee said in a video call, sitting in Whistle, her gallery in Itaewon, a red abstract painting by Eimei Kaneyama on the wall behind her. Such funding “doesn’t cover the whole thing, but at least it can be a little bit of relief from paying the shipping,” she said.

Lee started her gallery in 2017, after working at One and J., a key spot for emerging Korean contemporary art that opened in 2005. She wanted to “show the younger generation of artists,” she said. “It’s really tough for younger artists to enter commercial galleries in Korea.” As in so many places, the biggest galleries have established, international rosters, and many collectors gravitate toward bankable names.

Choi Jeong Hwa’s solo exhibition “Origin, Originality” was held
at P21 in 2017.

“Despite having a very rich art scene, many talented emerging artists in Korea do not have a platform in a commercial sector, although they are highly active in nonprofit art spaces and institutions,” Choi, the new König director, said. That led her to open P21, which has championed young figures like Heemin Chung, who makes deliriously frenetic paintings in a post-internet vein, and Haneyl Choi, whose charismatic, idiosyncratic sculptures (think Rachel Harrison) allude playfully to queer themes.

For foreign dealers entering Seoul, costs are by no means low, but the city is more affordable than some other metropolises. On a yearly list of the most expensive cities for expats compiled by ECA International, a consultancy specializing in cross-border business, the top three spots were occupied by Hong Kong, Tokyo, and New York. Seoul came in at number eight.

“If you’re opening up a gallery in New York, the seed money will be completely different,” Lee, the Whistle founder, said. “I think people in Asia are starting to look into Korea, because it’s kind of doable at this time.” And its duty-free status means “it’s essentially like Hong Kong, except it’s not tied to China,” Varet said.

As Beijing has tightened its control over the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, jailing protesters, crushing free speech, and banning opposition parties, there is talk of international firms abandoning the city. In an American Chamber of Commerce poll of businesses, reported on by Nikkei, nearly 40 percent of respondents said they would consider moving operations from the city. Deutsche Bank has shifted its Asia chief to Singapore, and the New York Times decided last summer to establish a base in Seoul, relocating some employees from Hong Kong. (Full disclosure: my wife’s job at the Times brought us here.) Could the art world follow, with South Korea deposing Hong Kong as the dominant arts hub in the region?

So far, there have been no signs of dealers packing up and heading elsewhere on political grounds. “Hong Kong has been unique in its positioning as a gateway to the international and mainland Chinese markets for many years,” Perrotin said. “We remain optimistic about it.”

“We are completely behind Hong Kong, because Hong Kong has been very good to us,” Lehmann said, while admitting, like everyone, “I don’t know how it’s going to go.”

Belgian collector Alain Servais said that he would feel uncomfortable visiting the city, given comments he has made on social media about China in the past. “I would consider positively a move of Art Basel to Korea or Taiwan,” he said, “but I am not naive, the negative and revengeful reaction of Beijing to such a move would make it a no-go for Art Basel because of the power and influence of Chinese collectors in the region.”

“There is a point at which such an erosion of progress makes a city untenable for the art businesses that exist there,” Glimcher said. “I don’t think that’s happened in Hong Kong. The example of that is Moscow. We were all going to Moscow three times a year.”

Regardless, that cost differential is notable. “Why spend those huge rents on the Pedder Building in Hong Kong and Central [the city’s business nexus], and get these tiny spaces, when you can have something really quite nice in Seoul?” said Iain Robertson, head of art business studies at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. He was referring to the century-old Beaux-Arts tower, home to branches of global galleries like Gagosian, Simon Lee, and until recently, Lehmann Maupin (which is planning to open a new space elsewhere in Hong Kong). To cover that overhead, he said, “you can only sell Picassos and Hirsts, really.”

In April, the New York Times reported that China was prepping tax breaks to keep companies loyal to Hong Kong. For art firms weighing their options, the city has the advantage of hosting a global fair, which began when Art Basel took over the annual Art HK in 2013. But Frieze, the London-based fair that also does shows in New York and Los Angeles, has been eyeing Seoul. In May, after months of speculation, it announced that it would stage a September fair in Seoul in 2022, with about 100 galleries, to coincide with the Korea Galleries Association’s annual Korea International Art Fair, which runs each fall at Coex.

The Coex Convention and Exhibition Center, which will be the home of the forthcoming Frieze Seoul art fair.

Frieze could shift energy from Hong Kong to Seoul. It could also bring new vigor to KIAF, which is the most high-profile market event of the year in Korea, but one that is still dominated by local exhibitors. At the 2019 edition (the 2020 outing was scuttled by a corona spike), only about a third of the booths featured exhibitors without a South Korean presence. Quipped Robertson, “It’s called the Korea International Art Fair. It’s anything but international.”

Of course, it takes more than well-capitalized companies and plucky entrepreneurs, whether foreign or domestic, to make a vital arts center. It takes solid art schools (check, in the form of Hongik, Seoul National, Korea National, and others). Alternative venues help too, and they have proliferated, aided by government grants and diverse funding models.

“We don’t do sales,” Sangjin Kim, director of a space called Out_Sight, said wryly. “We want to, but it’s not really easy.” There’s a wide divide between the commercial sector, where collectors buy, and the experimental realm, where they do not, in his view, and the gallery he runs with his wife, Jinho Lim, is very much in the latter category.

Kim, an artist, converted his basement workspace in lively Daehangno into Out_Sight in 2016, and has staged intrepid shows by untested artists. Proceeds from Kim’s own art sometimes go toward the gallery. “Yeah, we waste the money on this space,”
he said, laughing.

Public funding covers a portion of the budget. An Out_Sight show earlier this year by Dew Kim (who also goes by HornyHoneydew) featured rather graphic videos and sculptures made of bondage toys.

As the Korean art world grows, its denizens face the same challenges that their colleagues are dealing with elsewhere in the world: how to sustain it. Mega-galleries can generate buzz and get money flowing through the system, but long-term health requires a broad base of players. Asked about all the dealers who have been landing in town, Kim said matter-of-factly, “Although they’re in Seoul, for most young artists, that’s a different world.”

The same could be said of the Lees, the high-flying Samsung family that embodies so much of the glory and tumult of recent Korean history. Seoul-based art critic Dong-Yeon Koh called them “pioneers of art collecting in South Korea.” They are also notoriously secretive, even by the cloak-and-dagger standards of the chaebol, the family-run conglomerates that dominate many industries in the country. The National Museum and the MMCA have announced that they are readying shows devoted to Lee Kun-hee’s collections. There is no telling who might visit those exhibitions, decide to become a collector, and keep Seoul’s momentum going.

Update, June 21: An earlier version of this story stated incorrectly that Lehmann Maupin has its Hong Kong gallery in the Pedder Building.

“It’s with tremendous excitement that we are establishing the gallery in Seoul and a privilege to participate in and contribute to a city that has such strong and long-established foundations for artistic interchange,” Thaddaeus Ropac said in a statement. “The rich cultural history that is integral to the city is exemplified by the historic art academies, the incredible institutional infrastructure, and the tradition of nurturing each generation’s artists, and even over the short period of the past decade we’ve witnessed further exciting evolutions.”

The gallery cited “personal ties” to South Korea—including its representation of Lee Bul since 2007—as part of its reasoning to open a space there. (Lee’s work is currently the subject of a solo show at the Seoul Museum of Art.) The gallery also worked closely with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea to mount a Georg Baselitz exhibition in 2007, and it has since collaborated with other museums in the country to stage exhibitions of work by gallery artists like Marcel Duchamp, Harun Farocki, and Antony Gormley.

Ropac will join a crop of international galleries that have recently been operating in Seoul, including L.A.’s Various Small Fires and König Galerie, which has spaces in Berlin and London. Pace Gallery has operated in the city since 2017 and announced last month that it would expand to a larger space, also in the Hannam-dong district. Additionally, Phillips opened a branch there in 2018, and Frieze is looking into bringing an art fair to the city.

Kyu Jin Hwang, Thaddaeus Ropac’s Asia director, will oversee the new location’s operations while splitting her time between London and Seoul. In a statement, she said, “There is such energy and enthusiastic engagement with contemporary art in the city of Seoul, to which we will be contributing a varied exhibition and events program to meet this. Our team here is growing and we are delighted to play a role in the already flourishing art scene, both the local and regional discourse, building on our existing collaborations with artists, collectors, museums, and institutions.”

Today the family of Lee Kun-hee, the billionaire Samsung chieftain who died last October, began detailing his massive estate, the gargantuan tax they intend to pay on it, and their philanthropic plans, which include gifts of some 23,000 works from his art collection to South Korean museums and hundreds of millions of dollars to medical causes.

Samsung said in a press release on Wednesday morning that the family would pay more than 12 trillion Korean (about $10.8 billion) on the estate, which has been valued at around $20 billion. It is believed to be the most estate tax ever paid in the country, where the top rate can stretch above 50 percent. “It is our civic duty and responsibility to pay all taxes,” the Lee family said in a statement.

More than 20,000 of the pieces being donated are traditional Korean works, which will go to the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. They include dozens of items designated as National Treasures by the South Korean government. In addition, more than 1,200 pieces of modern and contemporary art will go the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), which has four branches in the country.

The works going to the MMCA include pieces by European giants like Claude Monet (a water lily painting), Salvador Dalí, Paul Gauguin, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The museum has focused its collecting on Korean figures, so the gifts will international breadth to its holdings. The bequest also includes important 20th-century Korean artists like Kim Whanki and Lee Jung-seop.

The MMCA said that it will organize an exhibition highlighting selections from the gift in the latter half of 2021. Its working title is “Masterpieces of Lee Kun-hee’s Collection.” It is also planning touring shows for museums elsewhere in South Korea and around the world.

Lee Jung-seop’s 1953 Bull, one of his most famous works, which is headed to the MMCA.

It is not just the big-league museums that are benefiting. The Korea Herald reported that work will also go to the Daegu Art Museum, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Jeonnam Museum of Art in the southern city of Gwangyang, the Park Soo Keun Museum in the northeastern province of Gangwon, and the Lee Jung Seop Art Gallery on Jeju island.

The Lee family had a deadline of six months to announce their plans, and in the run-up to the big announcement, there had been speculation that it might put art up auction to help cover the whopping tax bill, potentially sending major material out of the country. Some politicians and art professionals lobbied for a law that would have allowed art donations to state institutions to count toward taxes. That was not adopted, but the items marked for donation today will not be included in the final tax assessment. (Some reports have put the value of Lee’s art north of $2 billion.)

Not mentioned in today’s announcement, as the Yonhap News Agency noted, were major pieces by Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, and Francis Bacon, which are in the collection of the Leeum, a Samsung-run museum in Seoul. Some press accounts had suggested those works were being appraised for possible donation. Today’s 23,000 figure was also larger than the 12,000 number often floated as the total number of works owned by Lee Kun-hee.

The exact scale and makeup of collections belonging to Lee, his family, and Samsung have long been the subject of mystery and confusion. Art buying associated with the technology company burst into the spotlight in 2008, when prosecutors raided a Samsung warehouse in Yongin, just south of Seoul, and found pieces by Frank Stella, David Hockney, and Barnett Newman amid in investigation into the company’s accounting, as Yonhap reported at the time.

The Leeum and Hoam Museums administered by Samsung’s cultural foundation have been closed since the start of the pandemic, even as most other art institutions in the country have largely remained open. In 2017, Hong, Lee Kun-hee’s wife, stepped down as director of the Leeum after their son Lee Jae-yong was arrested on bribery charges, and  special exhibitions there were canceled.

Lee, who is the de facto head of Samsung, was sent to prison this past January on a 30-month sentence, potentially complicating estate planning. The family’s efforts to maintain control of shares in various Samsung affiliates has also made their tax preparations particularly delicate. The Financial Times reported that they will pay in six installments over the next five years, in part using loans against their Samsung shares to finance the bill.

Rumors of a March reopening for the Leeum, which is stocked with Korean and Western art, did not pan out. Its return is hotly anticipated in the local art world. A request for comment about its plans was not immediately returned.

Now enjoying a star turn in the capital, the screen painting has spent decades in Ohio. Its owner is the Dayton Art Institute, which received it as a gift in 1941 from Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, the radio journalist who reported for CBS during World War II. She told the DAI that her late uncle, Charles C. Goodrich, of the Goodrich tire fortune, rebuilt his drawing room to display the piece, which is more than 24 feet long, when he owned it. The DAI catalogued it as Japanese, but when the art historian Sherman Lee visited the museum in the late 1950s, he decided it was Chinese, from the 16th or 17th century, and described it as “not important as a painting—handsome—not many around.”

The work was shown in Dayton for stretches, but its poor condition consigned it to storage in recent decades, as Peter L. Doebler, the DAI’s curator of Asian art, recounts in an essay published as part of a recent symposium devoted to it. However, in 2007, a University of Tokyo team photographed it for a book on Chinese paintings in the United States, which is where the Japanese researcher Misato Ido spotted it. She decided something was amiss. In 2017, Ido traveled to Dayton with the South Korean scholar Soojin Kim, and they examined the work. Based on its size, materials, technique, and iconography, the pair concluded that it originated not in Japan or China, but Korea. They dated it to around the end of the Joseon Dynasty in the early 20th century, suspecting it was associated with the ruling court.

The work, made of silk, pigment, and gold leaf, “depicts the world of the immortals with flowing waves topped by peach trees, bamboo, and pine trees with six white cranes carousing among them,” Kim writes in an essay of her own. It is an elegant, action-packed composition with some of the birds boldly stretching their wings. Its gold leaf—applied in hundreds of tiny squares—glows. The presence of that medium is highly unusual for Korean art of the time, but a similarly gilded screen, at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, has been identified as coming from the Joseon court.

Before conservation: Sea, Cranes, and Peaches, early 20th century, Korean, colors on silk, gold leaf, 88 in. x 289 in. Click to enlarge.

While pictures of birds and water were popular in East Asia for centuries, the items that provide the work’s title (Haehakbandodo, in Korean) were among the longevity symbols favored in art made by Joseon leaders. In particular, the magical bando peach was believed to ripen once every 3,000 years, making it a potent symbol of everlasting life.

The fresh identification of the painting has also, in a sense, extended its own longevity. The DAI subsequently applied for a grant from the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation, a South Korean agency that helps to restore artworks in collections outside the country. Funding came through, allowing the piece to return to Seoul some 100 years after it likely left. There, specialists moved its silk surface from six panels to twelve, as it had originally (before being remounted at some point); excised later painting applied to disguise damage; and cleaned it. (The resulting show was organized by curator Paik Eungyeong and assistant curator Chu Hana.)

The work can also be navigated online, but those stopping by in-person have been rewarded with a souvenir pastry that is shaped and painted to resemble (and that tastes remarkably like) a little peach. It is a “means to wish the visitors good health in the era of corona pandemic,” the museum said.

After the show closes on February 10, Sea, Cranes, and Peaches will journey back to the DAI. Following the revelations about the piece, and the care applied to it, “I think it easily rises to the top 10 Asian artworks in Dayton’s collection,” Doebler, the DAI curator, said.

There is also, for Doebler, a larger lesson that can be drawn from the long process that led to identifying the work correctly. As he writes in his essay, “Perhaps in some way it can remind us that no matter where we may go, or what we may go through, we can always find our way home.”