Korea’s art world has more fans than ever. That doesn’t mean it’s selling more works.

In scale, Korea's art world is bigger than it was five years ago: more galleries, twice as many gallery visitors, more art fairs, more foreign curators passing through and more Korean dealers selling abroad.

In monetary value, however, it has shrunk. Sales of artworks across galleries, auction houses and art fairs peaked at 990.4 billion won ($727 million) in 2022 and fell to 684.9 billion won two years later. Most dealers surveyed expected 2025 to be worse still, according to data from the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) and the Seoul National University Business Research Institute.

That gap — between a public that keeps showing up and buyers that have pulled back — is the defining feature of the Korean art market in the 2020s.

It also complicates the tidy story told in 2022, when the arrival of Frieze Seoul was hailed as the moment the capital became a global art hub. Korea has undeniably become a place the art world visits — but not yet a place where more art gets bought.

More eyes on art

Gallery attendance in Korea doubled between 2021 and 2024, with most of that growth in Seoul, according to data provided to the Korea JoongAng Daily by KAMS.

Nationwide, visitors rose from 1.56 million to 3.16 million. The total peaked at 3.36 million in 2023 and slipped 6 percent the following year, but even the dip left it far above where it started. The country had 877 galleries in 2024, employing 2,272 people.

Most of the growth landed in the capital. Seoul had 346 galleries in 2021, 513 in 2023 and 511 in 2024, a 48 percent jump that has since plateaued. The number of galleries that actually held exhibitions also rose, from 336 to 495. Seoul’s visitor count rose from 904,250 to 2.03 million, up 125 percent, and kept rising in 2024 even as the national figure fell. Excluding Seoul, gallery visitors elsewhere fell from roughly 1.59 million in 2023 to 1.12 million in 2024, a drop of nearly 30 percent. Between 2021 and 2024, Seoul’s share of the nation’s gallerygoers climbed from 58 percent to 64 percent.

Seoul's galleries also drew more visitors individually. On average, galleries in the city had about 2,600 visitors in 2021 and nearly 4,000 in 2024, based on total visitors divided by the number of galleries.

The 2021 baseline of where the data starts deserves an asterisk — it was a year still hemmed in by Covid-19 pandemic social distancing rules, which flatters any comparison. But the numbers kept climbing well after pandemic era rules were gone.

But fewer buyers

While visitor numbers at galleries kept climbing, the money told a different story. Total sales across the art market's three main channels — galleries, auction houses and art fairs — peaked in 2022, then slid to 869.6 billion won in 2023 and 684.9 billion won in 2024, a 21 percent decline in that final year alone.

The downturn hit every channel: Gallery sales dropped 16.7 percent to 347 billion won, auction houses fell 23.4 percent to 120.5 billion won and art fairs contracted 26.5 percent to 217.4 billion won.

Volume fell even harder than cost value. The number of works sold dropped 34 percent in 2024, to 58,521, and at art fairs it more than halved. This was not a handful of trophy pieces going unsold. It was a market in which far fewer works changed hands and owners.

Seoul's galleries accounted for nearly 88 percent of all gallery sales nationwide, generating 266.6 billion won in 2021, 396.9 billion won in 2022, 392.1 billion won in 2023 and 304.6 billion won in 2024. But the growth in visitors far outpaced the growth in sales: Over three years, visitor numbers rose 125 percent while sales rose just 14 percent — and measured against the 2022 peak, sales were down 23 percent. 

Nor did 2025 bring any relief from the freeze in art sales. In a survey of 26 leading galleries operating in Korea, published in the annual Korea Art Market report, 57.7 percent said sales in the first half of the year fell from a year earlier, 61.5 percent said average prices dropped and more than half expected the full year to come in worse than 2024.

The same report, in its 2024 edition, explained the paradox: Rising visitor numbers do not mean rising sales. High interest rates, inflation, slowing growth and global instability hit buyers, according to the Korea Art Market report.

A crowded calendar

Nowhere is that paradox clearer than at art fairs, which have become the art market’s main stage. Korea held a total of 82 art fairs in 2023, according to the Korea Art Market report. Kiaf drew around 80,000 visitors that year, and Frieze Seoul and Art Busan drew about 70,000 each. In 2024, 514 galleries — 58.6 percent of the total — took part in at least one fair: 364 at home only, 132 at home and abroad and 19 abroad only.

The biggest of them now spill well beyond the convention hall at the fairs alone. Since the second Kiaf-Frieze week, Seoul Art Week has grown into a citywide program of gallery nights in Hannam, Samcheong and Cheongdam, previews by auction houses such as Phillips and Christie’s that have no Korean branch, pop-ups by foreign galleries and events by fashion houses including Prada, Dior and Chanel.

The value of big fairs like Kiaf and Frieze lay less in immediate sales than in bringing global art world figures to Korea and in the collaborations that followed, according to the Korea Art Market report.

Dealers are starting to ask what all that foot traffic is worth, however. The 2025 market report found galleries cutting back to fewer, more strategic fairs, citing high costs and poor conversion of visitors into buyers. The Preview, a fair for younger galleries, learned the lesson the hard way: It moved its 2024 edition to late August to ride the Kiaf-Frieze week, only to find collectors unwilling to buy ahead of the main fairs or to trek across the city from Coex to Seongsu. It went back to May in 2025.

Going out, coming in

Where the market has explicitly grown is in its international reach. The share of Korean gallery sales made at art fairs overseas dipped from 11.8 percent in 2021 to 9.2 percent in 2022, then climbed to 11.3 percent in 2023 and 14.8 percent in 2024. At least 151 galleries based in Korea showed at overseas fairs in 2024.

At home, the market has shrunk, but a growing slice of what Korean art dealers do sell is sold abroad.

The traffic runs both ways, with international art dealers also increasingly streaming into Seoul. Frieze Seoul’s attendance has held at roughly 70,000 a year since 2022, but its crowd has come from farther afield: visitors from 36 countries in 2023, 46 in 2024 and 48 in 2025, and representatives of more than 160 museums and institutions in 2025, up from more than 130 the year before.

Its gallery list has turned increasingly Asian: Of 133 participants this year, 52 of them first-timers, 85 came from Asia and 45 from Korea. At Frieze Seoul in 2024, according to the Korea Art Market report, many foreign galleries had built their booths around works priced between 100 million and 300 million won, tuned to what Korean and Asian collectors actually buy. Dealers do not recalibrate their stock for a country they plan to visit once.

How much of this Frieze caused is a question even those from the art fair itself answer modestly.

“Korea’s art ecosystem has been growing organically over decades,” Patrick Lee, director of Frieze Seoul, told the Korea JoongAng Daily.

Foreign galleries opening permanent spaces in Seoul is a trend that “started prior to the arrival of Frieze Seoul,” according to Lee, and the global art world’s growing year-round engagement with Korea is “a natural development of Korea’s art ecosystem,” driven by Korean artists, curators and institutions gaining influence abroad.

The fair accelerates rather than creates. As evidence of lasting change, Lee pointed not to sales but to the institutions that plan trips around the fair and to Seoul Art Week and Korea Art Week, programs that began with Frieze Week and have since outgrown it. Nor did he cast Seoul as Hong Kong’s rival as an art hub.

“There is room for many regional hubs,” he said.

The other 51 weeks

The test of a real art hub is what happens outside its busiest week. Organized art trips outside that week are still few, but they keep appearing. Specialist art tours have run since 2022, and in May 2024, Sotheby's Institute of Art and Larry's List ran a Seoul-Busan tour timed to Art Busan rather than Frieze, a sign that Korea's art calendar has more than one anchor.

The Korea Art Market report likened the pattern to the early years of Art Basel Hong Kong, while noting the numbers are still small comparatively. Frieze opened a year-round space, Frieze House Seoul, in Yaksu-dong last September.

Individual galleries fill in some of the picture. A Seoul-based international gallery that opened well before Frieze arrived counted 11,869 visitors in 2022, 13,410 in 2023, 12,394 in 2024 and 14,069 in 2025, with 8,438 so far this year. The show it mounts for fair week drew between 2,571 and 3,104 visitors in each of those four years — about a fifth of the annual total. The other four-fifths came at other times.

Johyun Gallery, based in Busan with a space in Seoul, estimates that about 30 percent of its visitors in 2025 came from abroad — roughly 6,300 of 20,969, most of them at its Dalmaji space in Busan — and that the share has held this year.

Neither case study is large, and neither proves a trend on its own. But both cut against the idea that Korea’s art world switches on for one week in September and goes dark for the rest of the year.

Somewhere in between

Five years after the introduction of Frieze Seoul, the Korean art market is two things at once.

Measured by attention, it has had a remarkable run: more galleries, twice the gallerygoers, a denser fair calendar, a wider international address book and more Korean dealers selling abroad. Measured by sales, it is smaller than it was in 2022 and, going by dealers’ expectations for 2025, still shrinking. The first set of numbers is what a hub looks like from the outside, while the second is what pays.

Which set of concerns matters more depends on what an art hub is for. Is it a place where people come to see art, or a place where art changes ownership? Hong Kong built its reputation largely as the second kind. Korea, for now, is mostly the first — and the week that was supposed to turn it into the second remains, in sales terms, unmeasured.

Views on where the market goes from here are split. The 2024 Korea Art Market report described the slump as "an adjustment period, with slower growth after the rapid expansion in 2022, which is still within the overall upward trend."

It also saw the crowds at fairs as future customers: "Although they may not be collectors at present, these represent a promising pool of potential buyers."

The report found younger collectors in 2023 buying works by emerging artists priced in the millions of won, even as the middle of the market thinned.

Some foreign dealers noticed the same shift from their booths.

"Visitors showed curiosity and eagerness to study even unfamiliar works, giving the impression that the Korean art market was diversifying and its base was expanding," Massimo De Carlo, founder of the Milan-based gallery named after him, said after the 2024 fair.

Galleries surveyed a year later were more guarded. In the 2025 report, they named "low conversion rates among visitors and high costs relative to sales" as the main reasons they had dropped out of fairs in the past.

When deciding whether to join a new fair, they ranked promotional value, the diversity of visitors and the quality of the art above cost. The report concluded that galleries increasingly use fairs "not just for transactional sales" but for artist branding, finding clients and curatorial positioning.

Either way, the question facing the market over the next five years is narrower than the one Frieze’s initial arrival in Seoul raised in 2022. 

Korea now definitely has the audience for art. What it is still waiting on is the buyers.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]