Frieze Seoul 2026

Andrew J. Park, Ava McDonough, Chanel Khoury, Erica Mahinay, Gus Monday, Jacopo Pagin, Julian Lombardi, Meghann Stephenson, Pia Ortuño, Sun Woo, Tuan Vu, Xingzi Gu

Make Room (Los Angeles) is pleased to return to Frieze Seoul with a group presentation of new and recent paintings by Sun Woo, Xingzi Gu, Jacopo Pagin, and Gus Monday, among others, on view at COEX from September 2 to 5, 2026. The presentation marks the first time Xingzi Gu, Jacopo Pagin, and Gus Monday exhibit in Seoul. The booth gathers a generation of artists working in controlled sentiment. Romance, in their hands, is not a subject but a way of paying attention: to a borrowed match, to an iron left mid-task. Feeling enters these paintings through technique rather than declaration. Airbrushed veils, thinned washes, charcoal dust, and stained canvas replace the loaded brush, so that emotion arrives as atmosphere, held at the temperature of restraint. Anchoring the presentation is a monumental new canvas by Sun Woo (b. 1994, Seoul), measuring 200 by 340 centimeters. The painting arrives on the occasion of Woo's work entering the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the canvas on view is the sister painting to the acquired work. In acrylic and charcoal, a stand of pines opens onto a clearing furnished like a home: an electric kettle waits on a wooden cart, an iron rests on its board, and sheets of long black hair drape the furniture where linens should hang. Woo, who lives and works in Seoul, builds the scene through airbrushed layers of near-photographic precision, letting tenderness and unease occupy the same low forest light. Xingzi Gu (b. 1995, Nanjing) presents Lend me a light (2025), oil and acrylic on canvas, in which two figures lean close beneath a scalloped red awning, one steadying a match for the other's cigarette while fireflies drift past. Gu soaks thin, dry layers of pigment into raw canvas, a method closer to ink-wash than to Western oil painting, until the scene hovers like breath on glass. The two figures never meet each other's eyes; both watch the flame. In La Musica e il Tempo Nascosto (2025), acrylic and oil on canvas, Jacopo Pagin (b. 1988, Italy) merges a woman's profile with the silhouette of a stringed instrument, its strings crossing her throat, a pearl bracelet catching the last light. Painted in an amber sfumato that recalls the hour when day bleeds into night, the work extends Pagin's inquiry into desire and the hidden tempo of images. Gus Monday (b. 2000, London) contributes a suite of intimately scaled new paintings that turn his exacting draughtsmanship toward domestic interiors, rooms where affection settles into the objects left behind. Seen together, these artists propose that sentiment, handled with discipline, remains one of painting's most exacting instruments: feeling measured out stroke by stroke, never allowed to spill. Sun Woo received her BA from Columbia University and has held solo exhibitions at Make Room, Los Angeles, and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. Her work is held in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Xingzi Gu holds an MFA from New York University, with recent solo exhibitions at Lubov and CLEARING, New York. Jacopo Pagin trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, and lives in Brussels; his work has shown at Manifesta XIII and is held in the collection of the Zhi Art Museum, Chengdu. Gus Monday is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, with a recent solo debut at Carl Kostyál, London.