Im Youngzoo Wins 2025 Frieze Seoul Award
170June 14, 2025
Frieze has named South Korean artist Im Youngzoo as the recipient of this year’sFrieze Seoul Artist Award. The honor is presented annually to a Korea-based emerging or midcareer artist in support of new work. Im will present her project at the fair’s fourth edition, to take place September 3–6 at the COEX Convention & Exhibition Center in Gangnam, Seoul. She is the third artist to receive the prize, after Woo Hannah, who won the inaugural award, and Choi Goen, who took home last year’s honor.
Born in Busan in 1982, Im is known for a practice that blends personal narrative with collective memory and explores the boundary between scientific fact and irrational beliefs such as superstition and religious faith. Working across media including video, installation, performance, and virtual reality, she examines themes including death, apocalypse, and outer space. Her winning project,Calming Signal, 2023/25, investigates ideas of similarity and community in response to the fair’s theme of “Future Commons.” Set within a gridlike structure, the three-channel video installation connects the instinctive gestures made by dogs to soothe one another—believed to be the result of domestication—with similarly learned behaviors performed by human individuals and communities in times of collective stress.
Im was selected by a jury including Yeon Shim Chung, professor of art history and theory at Hongik University; Gabriel Ritter, director of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Venus Lau, director of Jakarta’s Museum MACAN; South Korean artist Minouk Lim; and Jaeseok Kim, a onetime editor in chief of Art in Culture magazine
Im is currently shortlisted for the 2025 Korea Artist Prize. She has previously exhibited at venues including Seoul’s Perigee Hall & Gallery (2024) and Outsight (2021), and Doosan Gallery in New York (2019) and Seoul (2018).