Kiaf Seoul 2022
- Year
- 2022
- Location
- COEX, Kiaf Seoul 2022, Seoul, South Korea
- Type
- special
Exhibition Background
Kiaf Seoul (Korea International Art Fair), founded in 2002 by the Korea Galleries Association, has grown into Korea’s largest art fair by connecting the local gallery ecosystem to the international stage. In 2022, it was held alongside the inaugural Frieze Seoul at COEX, creating a shared art week that drew major numbers of global collectors and museum professionals. This collaboration highlighted Seoul’s rise as a strategic hub in the Asian art market, while also becoming a platform where contemporary art’s experimental and market-facing dimensions were tested together.
At Gallery Yeh’s booth, Guiyoung Lee presented her “Space of Thought” series, meeting Kiaf 2022’s international audience through paintings that combine Korean landscape sensibilities with impressions gathered abroad. Through her distinct spatial divisions and layered color fields, viewers encountered scenes where Korean sentiment and memories of global cities breathe within a single pictorial space.
Artwork Notes
Left | Space of Thought — Painting the Landscape (Acrylic on canvas, 112×194 cm, 2022)
For the artist, a “space of thought” is a private refuge that clears the mind. She brings together memories of the mountains and valleys of the Taebaek range—from Hangyeryeong toward Busan—with the brisk morning air she experienced on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge. The overlap of lived reality and recollection forms a sensory landscape, where cool light and flowing textures create a meditative space for the viewer to dwell in.
Right | Space of Thought — Drawing Space (Acrylic on canvas, 228×182 cm, 2022)
The composition is divided laterally: Korean nature on the left, impressions from a trip to Washington, D.C. on the right, with Gwanghwamun—part of the artist’s everyday route—positioned at the center. By juxtaposing personal movement with images of city and nature, the work shows how the lived stage of Seoul expands through overseas experience. Three places coexist on a single canvas, inviting the viewer to feel the artist’s gaze moving across time and space.