In the 21st century, South Korea has solidified its position as a global cultural powerhouse. K-pop dominates the global music industry, and K-dramas and K-literature have seamlessly entered people's daily lives worldwide, bridging popular culture and fine arts.

In 2024, a massive financial scandal rocked the South Korean art market. An art trading company called GALLERY K attracted large sums of money by promising investors a 7-9% annualized return and guaranteed principal, but recently, a class-action lawsuit by customers has revealed the full story.

Recently, the Korean art scene has been embroiled in a heated debate over the potential establishment of a branch of the iconic Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou (Pompidou Center) in Korea.

Last week, we reflected on the 30-year history of the Gwangju Biennale and its achievements. This week, we will discuss the current state of various biennales actively held across Korea, their challenges, and the direction they need to take moving forward, alongside the Gwangju Biennale.

The hot topic this year is the 30th anniversary of the Gwangju Biennale. To commemorate this, we will take a look at its achievements, divided into two parts. In Part 1, we will briefly review the history and accomplishments of the Gwangju Biennale, and in Part 2, we will examine the challenges it faces and its future prospects.

In this final article of the series, we will discuss the essential conditions for the success of Korean art fairs and the absolute necessity of global expansion. Additionally, we will briefly examine the operational status of KIAF and Frieze Seoul over the past three years and explore the underlying realities of the so-called "era of 100 art fairs" in Korea.

Contemporary art today encompasses a wide range of cultures, histories, and social experiences. Artists from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa are active in international biennials, museums, galleries, and art markets. Histories and cultures that received insufficient attention within Western-centered accounts of art history have also become important subjects of contemporary art.

To consider the future of Korean contemporary art, we must first examine the structures and standards through which the global art world operates today. Over the past century, Korean modern and contemporary art has developed by absorbing artistic forms, concepts, and institutions that originated in the West and transforming them within Korea’s own historical and social conditions. Today, however, the situation is different.

Moving beyond Orientalism entails more than shifting the center from the West to Asia. It requires transforming the structure through which particular actors have classified and evaluated the art of other regions, while developing new values and criteria grounded in diverse histories and experiences. What is needed is a new system of knowledge—one that recognizes the achievements of Western art history as a shared global legacy without treating them as the sole standard of judgment.

BTS emerged in Korea and developed within the cultural and industrial framework of K-pop. Yet the market in which its music is produced and consumed, as well as its audience and influence, moved beyond Korea’s geographical boundaries long ago.

“Asian contemporary art” does not refer to a single shared style or aesthetic. Korea, China, Japan, and the countries of Southeast Asia each have distinct histories, political and social conditions, art institutions, and markets.

The Anachronism series began by examining how Korean art has continued to understand and organize itself under changing conditions through languages, institutions, and models of success inherited from the past. It considered the recurring tendency to reproduce earlier