If you only do one booth at Frieze London, make it D11. Johyun Gallery, the Busan house that has kept a room on Dalmaji Hill since 1989, is hanging twelve artists there from 14 to 18 October. Twelve is a lot for a tent. Walk the paper first, then the objects made for this year.
Last October this same number was a two-person hang. Lee Bae and Kim Taek-sang shared D11. Park Seo-bo was across the park at Frieze Masters, booth F9, on his own. This year the Ecriture is in the contemporary tent with them, and the stand has filled out. Book the hour for that.
Start with the yellow one. Park Seo-bo’s Ecriture No.070405 (2007) is acrylic worked into Korean hanji, 130 by 162 centimetres, vertical strokes broken by a pale column. He died in 2023. In August a museum in his name opened beside the old studio in Yeonhui-dong. In the tent, you can get close enough to see the paper tooth.
Kim Tschang-yeul’s Recurrence (1991) hangs in the same breath: ink and oil, the water drops he painted for decades. Lee Ufan’s With Winds (1987) and a small Kishio Suga from 2014, Site of Spatial Emergence, wood and acrylic, sit with them. Suga is Japanese, a central figure in Mono-ha, the late-1960s “school of things.” Johyun treats that generation as one conversation. Give the four of them ten minutes before the newer walls start selling.
Lee Bae made his name with charcoal. At D11 the brushstroke has left the charcoal and become hardware. Brushstroke-staples 2au (2026) is a canvas, 220 by 152 centimetres, built from staples. Brushstroke ut9 (2026) is the same idea in bronze, about 120 kilograms, 175 centimetres high. One you can still read as a stroke. The other you could trip over. If you already know the black drawings, these two are the reason to stop.
Kim Taek-sang’s Flows 26-130 (2026) is the quiet water-acrylic between them. His solo, As It Is, is up at Johyun’s Dalmaji, Haeundae, and Seoul rooms through 8 November, so anyone who misses London can still see the larger idea on the hill.
Then the dog. Kang Kang-hoon’s Dobermann Pinscher (2026) is oil on canvas, 210 by 140 centimetres, a head-on Dobermann with turquoise flicked across the muzzle. People will photograph it. The person who came for hanji may find it loud. The turquoise is painted onto the coat, which is the point. Around that portrait, the 2026 hang stays with the present: Jo Jong-sung’s ink mountain on hanji, Lee Kwang-ho’s cactus, Ahn Jisan’s Little Worries. Khairulddin Wahab, the Singaporean painter born in 1990, adds As Above, so Below the Canopy, a small oil-and-acrylic forest interior. He won the UOB Painting of the Year in 2018. A Busan gallery’s London edit has room for him, and that is the tell.
Save the last look for the thing you could actually live with. Choi Byung-hoon’s afterimage of beginning 026-642 (2026) stacks black ash cabinets on a rough stone, with another stone caught between the upper boxes. The ash shows a dark wood grain. One stone is wedged between the upper boxes, and another holds the stack up. Ash, natural stone, an aluminium sheet: 185 by 83 by 38 centimetres.
“Stone is a lingering afterimage of the origin.”
He said that of this series, to Friedman Benda in 2025. In D11 the line is useful. The cabinet knows where a book would go, and the stone is doing the older job.
Ask the desk which of the 2026 works are still available before you fall for the bronze. The Ecriture is a 2007 painting, with an estate behind it. The staples, the dog, and the cabinet were made this year.
The tent is in the south of The Regent’s Park, entrance off Park Square West, NW1 4LL. Thursday is the public opening, and the short day. Members and invitation holders have the contemporary tent from 11:00. General admission starts at 13:00, and Frieze London closes at 17:00. Leave Masters for Friday. The shuttle to Gloucester Green will not buy back a tent that has already shut. Friday and Saturday run 11:00 to 19:00. Sunday closes at 18:00. Tickets are date-specific and online only. Early-bird prices are gone.
If the hour is tight, do D11 before you wander. The Korea hang in Bloomsbury is already open if the tent sends you back toward older objects, and it will still be there in January. Booth D11 will not.
