Choi Goen Wins 2024 Frieze Seoul Artist Award

Frieze on June 24 named South Korean sculptor and installation artist Choi Goen the winner ofFrieze Seoul’s 2024 Artist Award. The honor is presented to an emerging or midcareer artist in support of new work. Choi will present her project at the fair’s third edition, to take place September 4–7 at the COEX Convention & Exhibition Center in Gangnam, Seoul. She is the second artist to receive the prize, after Korean artist Woo Hannah, who won the inaugural award last year.

The artist’s winning commission is a large-scale sculptural installation in which discarded industrial elements including exhaust pipes and air-conditioning units will “serve not just as a manifestation of the hidden infrastructure behind our copious digital connections, but also as a reminder of the complex physical materials that silently permeate our urban environment,” according to a press release. The installation will offer a performative experience, relaying the movement and change taking place in COEX and beyond, pointing up the continually evolving relationship between art, technology and the urban landscape. Related ARTISTS＆MOTHERS ANNOUNCES $25,000 GRANT ASSISTING NEW YORK CITY ARTISTS WITH CHILDCARE TIFFANY SIA AND AHMED UMAR WIN 2024 BALOISE ART PRIZE

Choi’s proposal was chosen by a four-person jury whose members included Sungah Serena Choo, a curator at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art; artist Jeon Joonho; Kim Sung woo, curator and director of Seoul-based nonprofit Primary Practice; and Yung Ma, senior curator at London’s  Hayward Gallery. “Our heartfelt congratulations to Choi Goen, a highly respected figure in Korea’s art scene,” said Patrick Lee, director of Frieze Seoul, in a statement. “We are privileged to showcase artists of Goen’s caliber at Frieze Seoul, and eagerly anticipate our audience discovering more about her remarkable work.”

Born in 1985 in South Korea, Choi typically assembles mundane and household objects such as furniture and appliances into sculptures and installations that interact with their surrounds. The works comment on contemporary industrial society’s systems of production, distribution, disposal, and recycling. Choi has had exhibition at Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2023); Amado Art Space, Seoul (2022); Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2022); and P21 Gallery, London (2021).