For its 2025 edition, Kiaf SEOUL hosts over one hundred and twenty-five Korean galleries alongside participants from more than twenty countries and territories, reaffirming the fair’s role as a leading platform for global engagement with Korea’s vibrant art scene.
The fair highlight sworks by celebrated Korean modernists such as Seo-Bo Park and Whanki Kim, while also spotlighting a new wave of globally recognized Korean artists. Among the standout presentations from main Korean galleries, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, presents works by internationally acclaimed artists, including Anish Kapoor, Ugo Rondinone, and Ha Chong-Hyun, among others. Gallery Shilla, Daegu, stages a solo presentation by the Seoul-based art and technology collective Kimchi and Chips. Striking a balance between major international and Korean artists, 313 ART PROJECT, Seoul, presents works by artists including Antony Gormley and Lee Ufan. Sun Gallery, Seoul, showcases a curated selection of works by modern and contemporary artists, including Chungji Lee and Pato Bosich. Additional highlights include Johyun Gallery, Busan, and 021GALLERY, Daegu, whose programs exemplify the bold experimentation defining Korea’s current art moment.
Featuring nineteen booths this year, Kiaf PLUS spotlights material experimentation and cross cultural exchange from emerging voices across Korean and the global contemporary art scene. Highlights include Gallery DA SUN, Gwacheon, featuring Esther Wang’s layered cityscapes that merge urban and natural imagery to explore how place shapes memory and emotion; SARAHCROWN, New York, showcasing works by Heekyoung Jeon, Bushi, and Peter Depelchin, bringing together emerging voices from Asia and Europe with distinctive narrative and visual approaches; and Artemin Gallery, Taipei, presenting Nung-Hsuan Cheng, Mirza Cizmic, and Bram Kinsbergen, whose works explore memory and perception through layered abstraction, dark humor, and atmospheric figuration.
Kiaf SEOUL returns also with the third edition of the Kiaf HIGHLIGHTS Award, an initiative launched in 2023 to recognize and promote outstanding emerging artists participating in the fair. The 2025 award centers on the theme of “Resonance,” highlighting ten shortlisted emerging artists whose works demonstrate innovation, identity, conceptual rigor, and artistic excellence. A jury comprised of prominent museum curators in Korea selected the finalists from a pool of artists nominated by exhibiting galleries.
Kiaf SEOUL 2025’s special exhibition “Reverse Cabinet” commemorates the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan through a cross-cultural presentation that reimagines the act of collecting as an artistic practice. Co-curated by Yuli Yoon, Chief Curator of Ilmin Museum of Art, and Tomoya Iwata, Director of Tokyo’s alternative space The 5th Floor, the exhibition features the collection and reconfiguration of works by six emerging artists: Sunpil Don, Jihye Yeom, Geumhyung Jeong, and Kai Oh from Korea; and Kei Takemura and Sen Takahashi from Japan. “Reverse Cabinet” examines how contemporary Korean and Japanese artists interpret their cultural contexts through the creation of personal “cabinets” composed of sculptural installations, digital media, video, and archival materials. The exhibition reflects on collecting not as an act of possession, but as a critical act of creation, memory-making and intergenerational dialogue. From found objects and internet imagery to ephemeral experiences and personal memories, each artist explores how individual acts of collecting are shaped by identity, cultural inheritance, and creative authorship. In this process, the conventional distinctions between artist, collector, and viewer become fluid, framing collecting as a dynamic practice of meaning-making and reinterpretation of cultural contexts.
