Best Booths, Different Audiences: Takeaways from Frieze Seoul and the Armory Show

With the Armory Show in New York and Frieze Seoul running simultaneously in early September, the global art world’s attention turned once again to the fair booth.  A booth is not just square footage filled with art—it is part stage, part shop, and part curatorial statement. Some galleries treat it as a salesroom, others as a miniature exhibition, and the best manage to do both.

To evaluate the presentations, the MADE IN BED team relied on a few key criteria: coherence of curatorial concept, the significance and freshness of the artists on view, the design and presentation of the space, and the boldness of the choices—whether in spotlighting overlooked voices, staging solo shows, or taking risks with non-commercial work.

For this article, co-editors Alice Kim and Hector Chen have chosen ten booths that exemplify the best of this year’s fairs. Together, these ten presentations—from New York to Seoul—reflect the diversity, ambition, and energy that keep art fairs vital.

Frieze Seoul

Gladstone Gallery (New York, Brussels, Seoul)

“Precarity,” played with poise. Gladstone stacks volatility—George Condo’s nervous line, Philippe Parreno’s entrance-mounted Marquee (2019), and Anicka Yi’s Half Water, Half Mud, Half Sun—against the ballast of Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, and Gillian Carnegie, then paces the sightlines so the booth breathes rather than blares. Parreno’s flicker primes the eye; Yi’s lantern-like forms prompt a reflex to check for life inside—curiosity as activation. Beside them, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s tree-lacquer-and-gold-leaf newsprint seems to quiver with passing air, a small weather system of value and ephemera. Movement is in the booth’s quiet rigging: nothing living is present, yet everything feels alive. A study in calibrated instability—images that might tip, morph, or evaporate—while the presentation stays legible and crisp. No grandstanding; a lucid thesis on risk and restraint.

Gladstone’s presentation at Frieze Seoul. Photo Courtesy: Andrea Rossetti and Gladstone Gallery.

STPI (Singapore)

STPI builds the booth around a clear axis: at the very center, Do Ho Suh’s gate-like structure in a jade-toned palette stands with quiet authority, a threshold that resets the room’s tempo. Flanking it, works by Haegue Yang greet visitors and buttress the sightline, so the entry reads as passage rather than display. To the left, Lee Bul anchors the wing; a floor mirror beneath her piece extends its planes into the room. Sharing Suh’s jade register, it quietly locks the palette and heightens the booth’s cohesion. The right wall revisits each artist’s print-and-paper experiments, sequenced like interlocking puzzle pieces. The argument is elegant and legible: process as biography, Korean artists shaped in a transnational workshop and returned to Seoul at full charge. The through-line—structure, body, passage—feels both timely and rooted.

STPI’s presentation at Frieze Seoul. Photo Courtesy of the gallery.

SPURS Gallery (Beijing)

A bold, clarifying choice: a solo for Ulay (1943–2020) focused on his early arc—radical interventions, Auto-Polaroids, and the Relation Works with Marina Abramović—arguing that performance and photography are one medium. At the center, an old TV loops early films (Abramović features), while one wall is devoted to Irritation—There is a Criminal Touch to Art (1976) via photographs and a 16mm transfer. Opposite, the right wall concentrates on the seminal Polaroid self-depictions—man, woman, half-and-half (S’he, 1973), white bride, and more—identity used as method. Tight edit, clear thesis: action and risk as form. In a week heavy on objects, SPURS lands a historically alert read on the body as medium.

Spurs Gallery’s presentation at Frieze Seoul. Photo Courtesy of the gallery.

Maho Kubota Gallery (Tokyo)

Light leads—flickering like fireflies as a small ornament lamp pricks the space and echoes the curtain’s perforations. Noriko Ambe’s Tracking Through the Curtain 3 casts a perforated veil; on her white paper reliefs, shadows read like borrowed color. Step under the curtain and the room opens: Ambe’s carved topographies and Shinji Ogawa’s monochrome drawings sharpen depth and focus. Opposite, System of Culture’s clean fabricated photographs and Teppei Takeda’s optical feints keep the eye toggling between surface and apparition. Together, four Japanese artists—Ambe, Ogawa, Takeda, and System of Culture—critically examine perception, memory, and reality in contemporary life across installation, drawing, painting, and photography. The edit is minimal, the effect cumulative: a booth about attention itself.

Maho Kubota Gallery’s presentation at Frieze Seoul. Photo Courtesy of the gallery.

The Page Gallery (Seoul)

The Page stages the week’s most disciplined mise-en-scène, where traditional poise meets contemporary clarity and history slips into the present tense. A dark, wallpapered exterior wall stops the aisle and sets the mood; inside, the light drops to a considered hush, with a low table and stool signaling use over spectacle. At the center, Park Suk-won’s Accumulation—a stone sculpture with real gravitas—anchors the room and resets the pace from quick glances to sustained looking. Along the perimeter, Choi Myoung-Young’s white monochromes extend that calm, registering time as much as image, while a discreet thread of Robert Ryman’s minimalism is suggestively folded in. It’s a rare Masters presentation that rewards duration—slow, precise, and beautifully argued.

The Page Gallery’s presentation at Frieze Seoul. Photo Courtesy of the gallery.

Armory NY

Galerie La Forest Divonne (Paris, Bruxelles)

La Forest Divonne stages Vincent Bioulès with clarity: the front of the booth holds his historical works, while the back reveals his recent canvases. The layout itself becomes a narrative of persistence and renewal. Bioulès’s paintings brim with organic colors and shapes, yet their grounding in French Modernism—especially Matisse—remains unmistakable. As co-founder of Support/Surface who later turned to figuration, he has long resisted stylistic confinement. This presentation highlights that tension: rebellion tempered by tradition, abstraction giving way to subjectivity. The booth feels less like a commercial display than a miniature retrospective, affirming Bioulès’s enduring freedom and mastery.

Galerie La Forest Divonne’s presentation at Armory NY. Courtesy of the gallery and Hector Chen.

Ting Ting Art Space (Taipei)

Ting Ting Art Space makes a striking statement with a booth divided in two. On the left, Yi Xiu Cai revives traditional Chinese lacquer techniques, his works shimmering with patience, ritual, and the tactile richness of craft. On the right, Katharina Arndt and Moisés Yagües deliver satiric, more Western-inflected commentary—bright, ironic gestures that undercut contemporary consumer culture. The juxtaposition is deliberate: heritage and experimentation, discipline and provocation. Rather than collapsing into contrast, the two halves of the booth resonate, presenting Taiwan’s artistic voice as both rooted in tradition and fully conversant with global dialogues. It’s a booth alive with dualities.

Ting Ting Art Space’s presentation at Armory NY. Courtesy of the gallery and Hector Chen.

Kó (Lagos)

Kó’s solo for Victoria-Idongesit Udondian is a true sign of globalization: porcelain—long associated with Chinese export—becomes a medium for African histories and identities. Her series After the Last Supper reimagines blue-and-white Ming patterns through Black figuration, echoing Kerry James Marshall’s bold silhouettes while grounding them in postcolonial narratives. Plates, busts, and textiles incorporate shards from Jingdezhen alongside references to Benin bronzes and Ife heads, creating hybrid forms that hold the weight of both memory and migration. It is a unique blend that represents the world today—seductive in craft, critical in meaning, and alive with cultural entanglement.

Kó’s presentation at Armory NY. Courtesy of the gallery and Hector Chen.

A Lighthouse called Kanata (Tokyo) 

A Lighthouse called Kanata, also exhibiting at Frieze Seoul, presents 25 works by 25 artists simultaneously in New York. The common thread is line and flow: organic forms, precise contours, and a sense of movement uniting otherwise diverse practices. It is a brave approach, one that risks dilution, yet the booth feels strikingly coherent—and sales suggest audiences have responded. A standout is Yoko Togashi’s Bloom Softly 4-25, a kiln-washed glass sculpture in pink that seems to hover between solidity and breath. Its veiled translucence embodies Kanata’s ethos perfectly: material discipline transformed into lyrical presence.

A Lighthouse called Kanata’s presentation at Armory NY. Courtesy of the gallery and Hector Chen.

Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco)

Catharine Clark Gallery’s solo booth with textile artist Marie Watt underscores her gift for shared materiality—turning blankets, steel, and tin into art that is at once lively and reflective. Watt roots her work in Indigenous histories, yet her transformations of everyday objects invite broader readings. I was first drawn to the textiles, which echo the clarity of Mondrian and the solemn verticality of Barnett Newman, but on closer view their beaded words shift in and out of legibility, demanding time and presence. From jingle sculptures to blanket towers, Watt traces how materials carry stories, transmitting memory across cultures and generations.

Catharine Clark Gallery ’s presentation at Armory NY. Courtesy of the gallery and Hector Chen.

In a jittery global market, Seoul delivered a measured success. The fair drew more than 70,000 visitors from 48 countries and over 160 institutions, with celebrity-studded VIP days setting the tone. Top sales underscored the depth of the Asian collector base: Hauser & Wirth placed a $4.5 million Mark Bradford triptych—the most expensive reported sale since Frieze Seoul’s 2022 debut—alongside seven-figure works by George Condo, Louise Bourgeois, and Georg Baselitz. Korean galleries also saw strong results, with Hakgojae selling a 1962 Kim Whanki for $1.4 million and Gallery Hyundai placing a Chung Sang-Hwa for around $600,000. Across the week, works by established names such as Lee Bul, Jenny Holzer, and Jean-Michel Othoniel changed hands beside younger voices like Moka Lee, Lily Stockman, and Dominique Fung. Dealers noted both institutional interest and the presence of new regional collectors—a sign of Seoul’s growing gravitational pull.

Our selection makes clear that the two fairs, though simultaneous, are designed for different audiences. Seoul leaned toward Asian collectors and artists, anchoring its week in regional narratives and cross-cultural dialogues. Frieze New York, meanwhile, remains the entry point for the global fall season. At the Armory, sales were steady but more restrained: experimental works like Nikita Gale’s Interceptor found institutional homes at $60,000, mid-market ceramics and paintings by Alejandro García Contreras and Emily Coan moved between $8,500 and $40,000, and blue-chip placements of Tracey Emin and Kiki Smith reached seven figures. Reports suggest resilience rather than exuberance. Yet while Seoul provided a snapshot of regional strength, New York is still at the season’s beginning. With November’s evening auctions looming, the decisive test will be whether top-end demand materializes.

The takeaway: These twin fairs underscore the bifurcated reality of today’s market. In Asia, depth of regional demand and institutional engagement are holding firm; in New York, the focus shifts to global validation at the very top end. Neither fair offered fireworks, but both confirmed that quality, curation, and price discipline are what move the market now. The signal is clear: buyers are present, but they are more discerning than ever.

Alice Kim and Hector Chen

Interviews Co-Editor & Contributing Writer, respectively,

MADE IN BED