SEOUL.- On a recent sweltering morning in the Songhyeon neighborhood, a leafy area near the city’s sprawling medieval Gyeongbokgung Palace that’s dotted with galleries, artist Park Kyung Ryul was discussing her plans for this year’s Frieze Seoul.

Over coffee at the Baik Art gallery, Park, 45, explained that she doesn’t see her artworks as separate, stand-alone items. Instead, they’re all part of a continuum of her expression, she said, and her need to connect things as an artist. Small objects, from Buddha figurines to small mirrors collected from flea markets around South Korea, are attached to her works, mostly oil on canvas, which Park refers to as “sculpture paintings.”

“Sculpture painting is a way of treating all the elements of painting as even and recognizing the brushstroke as one object,” she explained. “When the finished painting is shown in the actual exhibition space, it becomes an object, just like the sculptures and other things that I place around it.”

That creative use of the exhibition space — placing found objects, pillars of wood and ceramics all throughout, to create what Park calls a natural environment — will be on full display next week in Focus Asia, a section of Frieze Seoul that will feature 10 Asian galleries, each spotlighting an emerging artist.

Park and Baik Art are making their debuts at the art fair, which, itself, debuted in 2022.

“I appreciate that Frieze understands that gallerists and art fair organizers are partners,” said Eugene Hong, the manager of Baik Art, which also has a presence in Los Angeles and Jakarta, Indonesia, adding that “having Focus Asia gives emerging artists like Park Kyung Ryul an opportunity for their voices to be seen and heard by a wider audience.”

It’s a sentiment that’s common among the 10 galleries that will be featured this year, as well as by the advisers to Focus Asia, Joselina Cruz, director and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, Philippines, and Hyejung Jang, the chief curator at Doosan Art Center in Seoul, a nonprofit gallery that nurtures emerging Korean artists.

Focus Asia is designed to include the entire continent. In a recent phone interview, Cruz noted that, at many art fairs, there were few galleries from Southeast Asia represented, and “Focus Asia is a way to attract more of them.”

“Hyejung and I both work for nonprofit institutions, and Frieze Seoul wanted people who weren’t necessarily engaged with the art market commercially,” she added.

As a result, she said, the galleries and artists in Focus Asia represent a cross-section of what’s happening across the continent.

Thai artist Taiki Sakpisit, 48, for example, is making his debut at Frieze Seoul, represented by SAC Gallery in Bangkok, with “Dark Was the Night” (2024), named after the gospel blues song by Blind Willie Johnson. Etchings, light boxes and a two-channel video installation were inspired by the 1976 Thammasat University democracy rallies that were violently crushed by Thai police and vigilantes.

Two pictures in the light boxes were taken at the site of the violence, and show a red elevator door and a scarlet curtain on an empty stage. “They have a haunting and otherworldly quality about them,” Sakpisit said.

Sakpisit — whose video installation about the French home where Pridi Banomyong, a prime minister of Thailand, and his family spent much of their life in exile — will be included in this fall’s Bangkok Biennale, said that visibility was important for artists in Asia.

“Art events like Frieze Seoul can be very relevant to represent personal experience from an artist’s country,” he said. “The Thammasat event is a significant wound in Thai history.”

Like Sakpisit, Sri Lankan artist Kingsley Gunatillake, 73, also mines his country’s history in his work, as in this year’s “Protest” series, eight works that depict the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. Using open books, Gunatillake re-creates battlefields.

“I burn the edges of the book, and I cut chunks out of the book to dig the trenches and then put the soldiers inside,” he explained. “It looks like the battlefields in the Sri Lankan war that I recall from the news.”

The books, in English, were gifts or found at secondhand bookstores near his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He sculpted dozens of small copper soldiers, which look almost like the playthings of a boy. He said that his works could also be seen to depict war and peace, but also protest and resolution.

“I want to show that the protests are a powerful thing, and we see it right now in Bangladesh and Myanmar,” Gunatillake said. “Books are to me a bridge to people. The wounds and scars of violence still hurt. We can’t erase our history. I want to show that.”

The Blueprint 12 of New Delhi, his sole gallery representative in India, is showing the moving, politically charged works.

“There is so much focus on in the global south, said Riddhi Bhalla, 43, Blueprint 12’s co-owner, using a term that some deploy to refer to developing and underdeveloped countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean. “And that is bringing a lot of focus onto Asia, and we’ve seen a shift with Nepal, India and Sri Lanka.”

She added, “South Korea is gaining momentum among collectors both in the country and internationally. It’s very important to showcase on such an important stage.”

That importance of that stage has been underscored by the attendance figures: In 2022 and 2023, Frieze Seoul drew some 70,000 visitors each year.

And Patrick Lee, the director of Frieze Seoul, noted that the Focus section got a good deal of attention.

“We place these artists right smack in the middle of the hall, and not off to the side somewhere,” Lee said. “This allows galleries to tap into a larger global audience. They can engage with a huge network of curators, writers, museums and collectors.”

He said that several of the artists shown in Focus Asia over the last two years had seen their visibility increase. For instance, after his Frieze Seoul presentation in 2022 with Yeo Workshop from Singapore, Fyerool Darma went on to show at the 2024 Lagos Biennial in Nigeria, and he will show at the 14th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

And Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu were represented by ROH gallery in Jakarta in 2022 and have been invited to show together at the Bangkok Art Biennale opening in October.

The Seoul gallery A-Lounge, which was also in last year’s Focus Asia section, can attest to the attention it received. Its featured artist, Jung Soojung, had 15 paintings at last year’s Frieze Seoul, which all sold.

“What was very impressive for us last year was that normally in all of these global fairs, you have a standard presentation and galleries,” said Min Lee, the founder of A-Lounge gallery, in a recent video interview. “Focus Asia provides a good entry point for artists and the opportunity to introduce these artists to foreign institutions and curators.”

A-Lounge this year will bring the works of Korean artist Cho Hyori, 31, who works mostly with acrylic paint on wood or metal and incorporates images from the video games of her youth, using the Sims stop-motion video software that creates 3D images as her inspiration.

“Hyori imagines a 3D world and then translates that into canvas, creating a virtual reality,” Min Lee said. “On the wall there will be five works, each inspired by landscapes that you might see in a rearview mirror and the blurred images of what you see in a speeding car.”

But in a twist of art presentation — perhaps a virtual centerpiece of Focus Asia and its celebration of young artists and new ideas — one painting will stand on its own.

“A circular painting in the center of the room on the floor will depict a manhole,” Min Lee said, with a pause. “Complete with a cigarette butt attached to it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.