InterviewPace Gallery Seoul's head works to carve out lasting place for Korean art

For the first two years after joining Pace Gallery, Lee Young-joo found herself constantly shuttling between Seoul and Hong Kong.

In 2015, the blue-chip New York gallery was looking toward Hong Kong, not Seoul. The Asian art market was expanding rapidly and the world’s major dealers were following the money into China.

Lee was brought in as a senior director to help with Pace’s growing Hong Kong operation, where she watched the city’s art world gradually transform.

But what she saw made her think about her home country.

“Dealers and artists from around the world were coming together in Hong Kong, and I was able to watch firsthand how that complex ecosystem grew and was absorbed back into the local market,” she said. “I kept thinking that I wanted to see something like that happen in Korea, too.”

Korean collectors were already traveling to Hong Kong to attend fairs and buy art. To Lee, that suggested something the global galleries had yet to fully recognize: Korea did not lack a market. Its infrastructure simply had not caught up with its growing appetite for international art.

She began persuading Pace to open a space in Seoul. In the first year of asking, she got little response. After another year of making her case, the gallery agreed to test the waters in 2017. Its first Seoul outpost was modest — more a cautious market experiment than a grand arrival.

Lee, however, had no intention of treating it as just another showroom.

“A gallery doesn’t end with simply opening its doors,” she said. She wanted to think about what Pace’s presence could mean not only for the dealer but for Korean audiences and the wider art world.

Her approach was partly informed by where she had started. At Seoul-based Arario Gallery, she worked for eight years as a curator and sales director, helping identify younger artists with the potential to enter museums and biennials and supporting them as their careers developed.

Pace offered a radically different situation, positioned as a gallery with more than six decades of history and a roster of artists whose legacies form the part of the history of modern and contemporary art.

For Lee, her move expanded not only her professional platform but also provided a different sense of time. “I began to look at artists not only for what they are doing now, but whether their work could still hold up after their passing and have a lasting place in history, beyond the present generation,” she said.

That long-term view became particularly consequential when she began considering which Korean creatives Pace could present to the world.

Lee did not just want to capitalize on the already growing international momentum around “dansaekhwa,” a movement known for monochrome abstract paintings.

Instead, her attention turned to Lee Kun-yong, an iconic name in Korean 20th-century avant-garde and conceptual art who, despite his stature at home, remained little known abroad.

In 2018, she brought his work to Pace’s Beijing outpost, assembling a substantial presentation spanning different periods of his career and commissioning new writing about his work, including an essay by art historian Joan Kee.

The exhibition did not immediately produce a commercial windfall, but it set in motion a different kind of interest. Exhibitions followed in Korea, Hong Kong and Geneva, while Lee’s visibility outside Korea continued to grow. In 2024, he was among the headline artists featured in the Guggenheim Museum’s “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s” in New York.

For Lee, that was the point: to rediscover Korean artists and “reconsider their place and meaning within a broader art history.”

That meant staging exhibitions that could engage curators and researchers, and building lasting institutional relationships that could carry an artist’s oeuvre beyond the inevitably fast-moving cycle of a commercial gallery.

The approach became even more pronounced after Pace moved into its new, much larger space in Seoul’s Hannam-dong, designed by Golden Lion-winning architect Cho Min-suk.

It also informed exhibitions that placed Korean artists alongside those from very different traditions. A 2025 show pairing Kim Whanki, one of Korea’s best-known abstractionists, with the American abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb took her more than three years to bring together.

Their connection was not an obvious one, but that was precisely what interested her. What might emerge when two figures, shaped by different histories and eras, were placed in dialogue?

She has continued to pursue that kind of rediscovery. Her latest exhibition at the gallery, devoted to Park Young-sook, similarly looks beyond novelty to examine Park’s body of moon jar-inspired forms developed over decades.

For Lee, that is where a gallery can play a role beyond selling art — not simply identifying what is already receiving attention, but helping determine what deserves to be remembered.

“If an artist is already popular, Pace’s headquarters can exhibit and sell their work in New York. There has to be a reason to bring that creative all the way to Korea,” she said.

“That’s why I also spend a lot of time thinking about projects that are more experimental, things that could have a genuinely positive impact on audiences and institutions when these artists are shown here.”

A decade ago, Lee was the person arguing that Korea deserved a place on the global gallery world's map. Today, Seoul no longer needs to prove itself as a market opportunity.

Instead, as senior vice president of Pace Gallery, she is now using the gallery’s reach to make a different case: that Korean art belongs not just in the global market, but in the broader history of art.