Join us in Korea for the gallery’s inaugural participation in Frieze Seoul.

Frieze Seoul 2026
Material Practice Booth M6

COEX, 513 Yeongdong-daero
Gangnam-gu
Seoul 06164, South Korea

Hours
September 02, 11AM – 7PM (Preview)
September 03, 11AM – 7PM
September 04, 11AM – 7PM
September 05, 11AM – 7PM

Get Frieze Seoul tickets here.

Marta is honored to announce its inaugural participation in Frieze Seoul with a dual presentation of functional-sculptural works by Korean-born, US-based artist and designer Minjae Kim and paintings by Korean artist Myoung-Ae Lee. As a Material Practice exhibitor—a new section of the Fair dedicated to works at the intersection of contemporary art and design—the gallery’s booth (M6) offers a new venue for the artists’ work to dialogue, continuing a lineage of co-presentations between mother and son that began in 2022. The first show of their work together in Korea, the exhibition considers Kim and Lee’s shared visual language in their respective explorations of heritage and the role of iconography in shaping, and extending, cultural identity.

Arranged like an abstracted classroom, visitors will encounter Kim’s nine unique chairs configured in a three-by-three grid. Built and shaped from Douglas Fir, each work hosts an anatomical imprint—a “butt print,” if you will—hand-carved into its seat, projecting a spirit that reflects their relationship to the owner/sitter. Moon Jar No. 7 (2024)–moon jars being a prototypical export of Korean craft; traditionally ceramic—sits on a pedestal, its curved resin-coated fiberglass surface painted and marked by Kim. His gestures, loose and swift, foil the articulated jags of Lee's Work 2103 — Ideal Landscape (2021), which hint generally at idyllic but unspecified mountainscapes of the region, idealized as opposed representational. Rendered in a lush palette of greens, Lee’s layered ranges extend a philosophical lesson in Korean geography while considering another iconic form, that so-called “ideal landscape,” to which audiences have been repeatedly exposed both at home and abroad.

Within their individual practices, both artists examine what it means to be “traditionally Korean”—a nuanced perspective that celebrates the visual foundations of their heritage while reserving the right to its examination and reinterpretation. The twenty-seven panels that comprise Lee’s Work 2103 — Ideal Landscape (2021) are discrete paintings that also exist as a single entity, understood through the recognition of the work’s composite nature. Kim’s Photo Booth (2025), the artist’s first technology-focused work, performs as a Take Out Mirror, per the artist, presenting visitors with an opportunity to casually capture themselves on thermal paper and leave in possession of a low-resolution self-portrait. Here, we enter into the exchange of ideas and become the figurative element of the artist’s interactive sculpture, existing in compliment to the spectre-like form (Drone, 2026) hung opposite Lee’s paintings. Its visage, Kim’s interpretation of a traditional Korean mask, embodies the tension between collective history and individual performance and looks to the future as an opportunity to evolve this dynamic with each new generation.

Minjae Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. An alumnus of the Architecture program at Columbia University, in 2018 Kim began complementing his interest in the built environment with works built by hand. Kim’s dovetailing sculpture and furniture practices persuade through functionality both suggested and actual. From his predictive bodily impressions in wood to the silhouettes of his quilted fiberglass hulls and vessels, Kim insists on the invitation to actuate form and produce generative artistic meaning through materiality and touch. The artist’s inaugural solo exhibition, I Was Evening All Afternoon, was held at Marta in 2021, and Kim has since gone on to present work with Etage Projects, Nina Johnson, Blunk Space, and Salon 94 among others. His sprawling follow-up solo exhibition, Phantom–22, was presented at Marta in 2025. He has been recognized in a cadre of publications, including Apartamento, Architectural Digest, Cultured, Financial Times, MilK, The New York Times, Office, Pin–Up, Surface, and Wallpaper*

Myoung-Ae Lee lives and works in Daejeon, South Korea. Myoung-Ae has been active in the Korean art scene since 1982, participating in multiple group shows and featured in several trade publications. In 2000, she received her Masters degree in Fine Arts from Kei-Myong University, and in 2016 received her PhD in Fine Arts at Won-Kwang University with her dissertation ‘The Reinterpretation of Space Through Shaped Canvas.’ Lee’s work—which comprises oil paint on canvas, as well as collages of natural fiber, fabric, and plaster on shaped canvas—explores the delicate relationships of individual entities as they relate to the whole, translated by way of the broad and recurring theme of coexistence (after which many of her works are named). She has shown her work in New York, Los Angeles, Wiesbaden, Berlin, Daejeon, Jeju, and Seoul. This is her second presentation with the gallery.