SEOUL.- Gagosian will participate in the fourth edition of Frieze Seoul at COEX, opening September 3, 2025, with paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by an international grouping of gallery artists. Through a wide range of projects from 1965 to today, the gallery’s presentation explores the cultural and psychological resonance of the human figure, the intersection of ancient myth and contemporary narrative, and the ways in which traditional methods inform new innovations.

In the four-panel epic A Picture of the Blessed Lion Who Nestles with the Secrets of Death and Life (2014), Takashi Murakami applies the kezuri technique of repeatedly layering and sanding a painted surface to an elaborate vision of the Japanese myth of the karajishi (“China-lion”), a beast responsible for guarding Buddhist temples. The depicted scene—a test of strength endured by karajishi cubs that involves being thrown off a cliff by their parents—allegorizes the qualities of resilience and power.

An untitled blackboard painting in oil and wax crayon on paper from 1970 by Cy Twombly features rows of the artist’s distinctive looping lines, which suggest handwritten chalk text without resolving into legible words. An outwardly simple abstract composition, it is infused with a timeless spiritual energy, demonstrating Twombly’s unique ability to fuse personal insight with mythological reflection, and hinting at language and legend while remaining formally abstract.

Escape Route (2025) finds Sarah Sze furthering her investigation of the ways in which we build meaning from the stream of images that saturate contemporary life by combining gestural brushstrokes and collaged reproductions with traditional Japanese printmaking, Chinese scroll, and Western landscape painting techniques. Escape Route’s complex swirl of imagery blurs the boundary between two and three dimensions, investigating the flux of human memory and perception.

Nam June Paik’s Ambassador TV (2005) also acts within the intersection of mediums. A video work, it plays on a monitor housed in a repurposed metal television cabinet decorated by the artist with gestural marks in acrylic paint and permanent oil marker. An example of Paik’s “late-style” work, it focuses on the interplay of electronic technology and human thought, extending his earlier experiments with altered television signals in the context of sculptural installation.

In Premium Soy Sauce (2024), Urs Fischer layers elements of painting, printing, and photography to conjure a disorienting swirl of fragmented imagery, in which recognizable elements of commercial packaging are fused with oblique passages of abstraction. Suspended between analog and digital, flatness and depth, it explores the dynamics of representation with the artist’s characteristic wit.

In conjunction with the fair, Seoul, Kawaii Summer Vacation, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Takashi Murakami, is on view in the headquarters of Amorepacific, the world-renowned Korean beauty and cosmetic company, in the center of Seoul. Opening on September 2, it is presented in the APMA Cabinet, a project space on the ground floor of the David Chipperfield–designed building.

Featured artists at Frieze Seoul include Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, Julie Curtiss, Edmund de Waal, Urs Fischer, Katharina Grosse, Tetsuya Ishida, Donald Judd, Takashi Murakami, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Avery Singer, Spencer Sweeney, Sarah Sze, Cy Twombly, Mary Weatherford, Tom Wesselmann, Stanley Whitney, and Issy Wood.