At Frieze Seoul, an Artful Marriage of the Digital & Physical Realms

In 1986, the visionary Korean artist Nam June Paik warned: “High tech is progress. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war.” Paik, often hailed as the father of video art, viewed technology as a double-edged sword, something to be both revered and feared. And a “strong human element” was necessary to balance its power.

Nearly 50 years later, as the proliferation of AI-generated images and videos ignite culture wars, Paik’s words feel almost hauntingly prophetic—and his salient installations have gained new pertinence. This week, they are among hundreds of artworks being shown in the late artist’s hometown, as part of Frieze Seoul, where they stand alongside a wealth of global contemporary artists, and digital natives, for whom his sentiments ring truer than ever.

This year’s fair—which marks its third iteration in the South Korean capital—comprises 117 galleries from across 32 countries, but places special emphasis on Korea, including new collaborations with the coinciding Busan and Gwangju biennials. Here, meet five contemporary Korean artists confronting and exploring the complexities of identity, perception, and existence in our digital and physical landscapes.

Jihyoung Han

Jihyoung Han’s painting delves into the enigmatic interplay between pseudoscience and human identity, a reflection and a critique of the digital age’s impact on our understanding of self. Her hazy, pixelated paintings—ghostly images rendered by spraying acrylic onto white canvas—evoke both familiarity and estrangement. The transformed, almost alien forms depicted muddy the lines between biological and synthetic, inviting viewers to question the essence of their own identities.

“I was contemplating the idea of becoming a cyborg, and the blurred boundaries between human and machine in the year 2100,” says the artist of her starting point for The Luncheon on the bed, shown with Jason Haam as part of Frieze. “It involves thinking through the body and confronting its edges and limits—an eternal quest for understanding, coupled with the perpetual impossibility of fully achieving it.”

This particular work Han conceived in a state of jet lag, while living across multiple time zones. A sense of instability is echoed in the piece’s sociological line of questioning—covering racism, xenophobia, immigration, and minority—all which exist “within complex, mixed terrains.” “Turbulence is a crucial ingredient for me,” the artist explains.

Han’s art reflects her ongoing inquiry into how modern technology, social media, and culture shape us. Each piece acts as a metaphorical experiment, exploring how new, subjective identities and forms can emerge from the constant flux of the digital and physical realms.

Sojung Jun

Born in Busan and now based in Seoul, Sojung Jun’s works tend to traverse time, geography, and identity. “I often dream about traveling—jumping from place to place,” the MMCA Korea Artist Prize finalist explains. Her work, Syncope (2023), shown at Frieze, encapsulates her ongoing fascination with movement, both literal and metaphorical.

Created with fellow female musicians who have traversed great distances in pursuit of sound, Syncope is a meditation on music, migration, and memory. Inspired by the relentless pace of the trans-Siberian train—a symbol of colonial expansion, and an echo of the 19th-century dream of connecting Asia and Europe—Syncope delves into the gaps and pauses within that motion, conceiving the stories lost in the imagined derailment and delays along the way. Working with traditional instruments like the gayageum and gamelan, Jun juxtaposes the unrecorded, the unwritten, and the forgotten against the rigid structure of the musical score, crafting a piece that feels as much a journey as a performance.

Jun’s work often reflects a deep interest in nonlinear narratives, as she reimagines the entangled histories of Korean women through sound and movement. “Perhaps I wanted to distance myself from the simplifications of modern narratives of time and progress,” she muses, “and create a zone where I could understand the entanglements and arrangements of different materials and various life forms.”

Taewon Ahn

The son of a computer programmer, and a child of the ’90s, Seoul-born artist Taewon Ahn grew up at the crossroads of Korea’s rapid transition from analog to digital—a shift that deeply shaped his artistic sensibilities. Ahn was an early adopter of technology, but his progressive “visual fatigue” and disillusionment with the digital realm sparked a creative pivot. Soon, Ahn began incorporating his two cats, Hiro and Mako, into his work, using them as a tactile bridge to reality. “My daily life revolves around my cats,” he says. “They keep me grounded and prevent me from becoming too absorbed in my phone.”

Ahn’s work transforms digitally distorted images into three dimensions, blending the precision of digital tools with the craftsmanship of the analog world. His cats contort into serpents, insects and architectural structures—becoming physical embodiments of digital hybrids and disinformation. “The essence of my work lies in enjoying the process of bringing digital fantasy into the tangible world,” Ahn explains.

Moka Lee

It was on a trip to Berlin last year that Moka Lee first encountered ‘The Ideal City’—a painting attributed to Italian Renaissance artist Francesco di Giorgio Martini. “It is a landscape, but filled with so much eeriness,” she explains. “I wanted to recreate something similar to that in my own way.” The Seoul-based artist has since further developed her own uncanny style of portraiture, pulling images of strangers (often from social media), and committing them to the canvas—melding the infinite unknowability, immediacy and intimacy of the internet to craft paintings charged with a unique sense of unease.

Beginning with colder colours and graduating through warmer ones, Lee layers paint in a technique that mirrors both the process of digital printing and the imagined, but inevitable, nuances of her characters. “We humans have multifaceted versions of ourselves,” she explains, “and I like my paintings to be just like that—alive.” Without imposing any one correct reading of the work, Lee invites a deeper examination of how digital personas shape our understanding of self and others, suggesting that the true essence of identity often lies in the space between visibility and perception. “I always intend to fill my paintings with margins of being understood in many different ways,” she explains. “The diversity of being digested in various forms makes me feel that I achieved something complex and interesting.”

Kwangho Lee

After studying Metal Art and Design at Hongik University, Kwangho Lee began his career designing innovative furniture and lighting installations. Over time, the Seoul native has expanded into mixed media sculpture—fusing folk art techniques and industrial materials like enameled copper, which forms the basis of his work for Frieze.

Taken from the artist’s Dissolve series, Lee’s work exhibited by Leeahn Gallery marks a departure from his previous methods, as he explores the fusion of materials to blur the lines between art and craft, transforming copper and cloisonné into pseudo-minerals that echo the complexities of contemporary life. “Their colors and textures are reminiscent of the eroded plastic skin of dinosaurs seen at theme parks,” reads the exhibition info. “Some might consider them mixed-media experiments attempting graffiti on large charcoal blocks.” This series captures the complexity and hybrid nature of the digital age while remaining rooted in the tangible, physical world of his past—a past which also informs his custom work in collaboration with perfumer Jo Malone.

“When I was immersed in my work, I thought a lot about my childhood,” he explains, “rural scenery, the smell of the soil before it rained, the smell of rice being cooked, the smell of the ground, the sound of the wind, when I played in the valley. I recalled a lot of sensory memories.” The result is a 3-dimensional rendering of his work for Leeahn, comprising sheet copper that is bended, folded, enameled and fired in a process he parallels with Jo Malone’s method of “scent layering.”