IN THE 1930S, a savvy developer embarked on a real-estate venture in Samcheong, a neighborhood in the heart of Seoul that was once home to a six-hundred-year-old village. Using modern materials for an urban update to the traditional Korean building style, the company created the Bukchon Hanok Village, a tony residential area whose narrow winding streets are now firmly on the tourist map.On Monday of Seoul Art Week, Various Small Fires hosted a reception in one of Bukchon’s hanoks, whose basement had been retooled as a viewing room for a suite of painted prints by Kyungmi Shin. Those who snuck
While Hong Kong still remains relatively closed off to visitors due to the city’s stringent quarantine measures, other Asian art hubs are slowly roaring back to life. The last weekend of August saw Southeast Asian collectors flocking to Sotheby’s first live sale in Singapore in 15 years, as well as to Indonesia’s Art Jakarta fair, which returned after a two-year.
In the ever-shifting landscape of art fairs, work that was once praised as “Instagrammable” is now dismissed as “Instagrammy” pretty clickbait for the surface of a screen, great for posting selfies, but lacking depth.