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K-pop, K-drama… K-art. Frieze fair lands in Seoul

4 Sep 2022 5 Sep 2022

The art world landed in Seoul this week for the inaugural edition of Frieze in Asia, as the vibrant South Korean capital looks to position itself as the region’s next art hub.

Previous Frieze fairs have been held in traditional art capitals like London, Paris and New York, but industry experts say Seoul was a natural pick for the first Asian edition of the prestigious event.

South Korea has emerged as a cultural powerhouse in recent years with the global success of the Oscar-winning film “Parasite” and the Netflix series “Squid Game”, and with K-pop superstars BTS sweeping the Billboard music charts.

“Frieze looks to cities where there is a vast appreciation of culture,” Patrick Lee, the inaugural director of Frieze Seoul, told AFP.

Seoul boasts a rich art scene, he added, with “incredibly talented artists, world-class museums, corporate collections, non-profits, biennales and galleries, which make it an ideal location for an art fair”.

The fair also takes place at a time when the art world is turning away from Hong Kong — long considered the hub of the lucrative Asian art market — over looming financial and political uncertainties, as well as quarantine restrictions still imposed on visitors.

“Seoul is definitely the most vibrant and exciting market in Asia for now,” said Alice Lung, director of Galerie Perrotin, which opened its second Seoul gallery last month.

Tim Schneider, art business editor of Artnet News, said the openings by major Western galleries like Pace, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Thaddaeus Ropac, followed by Frieze, confirmed that Seoul had “levelled up” on the international art stage.

“Frieze Seoul is just the final confirmation that the demand has been here,” he told AFP.

– Covid boost –

The local art market has seen explosive growth since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with local art fairs seeing record foot traffic and sales figures last year.

“When the borders were closed for a while, people focused on online viewing,” Lung of Galerie Perrotin told AFP.

“This helped Korean artists and galleries grow faster without any physical limitation, bringing in new collectors,” especially millennials and Generation Z, she said.

During this time, skyrocketing housing prices prompted many young South Koreans to seek alternate investment options, such as stocks, cryptocurrency and, for some, artworks.

“Many young people tasted bitter losses from stock and crypto investments and artwork appeared a safe bet, especially after high-profile success cases,” said Hwang Dal-seung, president of the Galleries Association of Korea.

The late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee left a trove of antiques and artworks — including works by Claude Monet, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso — reportedly worth two to three trillion won ($1.5-2.2 billion) which had soared in value during his decades-long ownership, Hwang added.

Schneider said South Korea was a “microcosm of Asia” in terms of the rise of collectors born after 1980, who now exercise heavy influence on the market.

“Buyers from this age group and this region have been reshaping the hierarchy of which artists are most in demand internationally, as well as significantly ramping up the speed at which artists can transition from the emerging level to blue-chip prices and global fame,” he added.

The country’s art market was estimated to be worth around 532.9 billion won in the first half of 2022, according to a July report from the state-run Korea Arts Administration Service — more than the whole of 2021.

– Fresh approach –

Thaddaeus Ropac, who opened his Seoul gallery last year, said South Korea offered a balanced demographic of collectors.

“You have very established collectors who are not too young anymore and who have incredible experience and who collect art for 30 years or 40 years and you see the results, which I think is quite astonishing in its quality,” Ropac told AFP.

“But then you also feel a very fresh new approach to art” from younger collectors, he added.

The Austrian gallerist, who began working with South Korean artists nearly two decades ago, said the country’s art scene — artists, curators, collectors — had been “built for generations”.

The arrival of Frieze Seoul would certainly open new doors for South Korea’s art market, he said, but it was “also a result of what Seoul has become”.

Schneider added: “Historically, anytime a grade-A international fair sets up shop in a new city, it simultaneously confirms that the art-market infrastructure there is sustainable.”

But he dismissed framing Seoul’s rise in terms of Hong Kong’s potential fall.

“I think it’s misguided to act as if Asia –– a massive continent composed of numerous countries with unique cultural histories and tremendous wealth –– can’t support two legitimate art-market hubs,” he said.

Argentine ministry links four deaths to Legionnaires' disease

3 Sep 2022 4 Sep 2022

Argentine health officials said Saturday that four people in a clinic in northwestern Tucuman province had died of Legionnaires’ disease, a relatively rare bacterial infection of the lungs.

Health Minister Carla Vizzotti told reporters that Legionnaires’ had been identified as the underlying cause of double pneumonia in the four, who had suffered high fevers, body aches and trouble breathing.

The deaths, all since Monday, occurred in a single clinic in the city of San Miguel de Tucuman.

The latest, on Saturday morning, was that of a 48-year-old man with underlying health problems. A 70-year-old woman who had undergone surgery in the clinic was also a victim.

Seven other symptomatic cases have been identified, all from the same establishment and nearly all involving clinic personnel, provincial officials said.

Of those seven, “four remain hospitalized, three of them under respiratory assistance, and three are under home surveillance, with less complicated clinical symptoms,” said provincial health minister Luis Medina Ruiz on Saturday.

The disease, which first appeared at a 1976 meeting of the American Legion veterans group in the US city of Philadelphia, has been linked to contaminated water or unclean air-conditioning systems.

When the outbreak in Tucuman was first detected, doctors tested the afflicted for Covid-19, flu and the hantavirus, but ruled all of them out.

Samples were then sent to the prestigious Malbran Institute in Buenos Aires. Tests there pointed to Legionnaires’.

On Wednesday, Medina Ruiz had said that “toxic and environmental causes” could not be ruled out. He noted that the clinic’s climate-control systems were being checked.

Vizzotti said authorities are working to ensure the clinic is safe for patients and staff.

Hector Sale, president of the Tucuman provincial medical college, earlier this week described the bacterial infection as “aggressive.”

But he added that it is not normally transmitted person-to-person, and that no close contact of any of the 11 infected people showed symptoms.

NASA will not try new Moon rocket launch attempt in coming days

3 Sep 2022 3 Sep 2022

After scrapping a second attempt to get its new 30-story rocket off the ground due to a fuel leak, NASA announced on Saturday it will not try again during its current window of opportunity, which ends early next week.

Determined by the position of the Earth and Moon, the current launch period for NASA’s Artemis 1 mission ends Tuesday and is “definitely off the table,” said Jim Free, associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development, at a press conference Saturday, without confirming a new date.

The next possible launch windows according to NASA are September 19 to October 4 and then October 17 to 31.

Millions around the globe and crowds gathered on beaches in Florida had hoped to witness the historic blastoff of the Space Launch System (SLS), but a leak near the base of the rocket was found as ultra-cold liquid hydrogen was pumped in.

“The launch director waived off today’s Artemis I launch,” NASA said in a statement. “Multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak… did not fix the issue.”

The latest postponement “was the right decision after you develop this kind of leak,” astronaut Victor Glover told reporters.

“These (are) really incredibly complex machines. When you see a scrub, people should gain confidence, not lose confidence.”

The initial launch attempt on Monday was also halted after engineers detected a fuel leak and a sensor showed that one of the rocket’s four main engines was too hot.

– Next month? –

The rocket will likely have to be hauled back into its assembly building to undergo certification tests that are carried out periodically.

Soon after Saturday’s launch was scrubbed, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that a next attempt may have to be put off until mid-October because early next month a crew will use the Kennedy Space Center to travel to the International Space Station.

Early in the morning, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson had given the go-ahead to start filling the rocket’s tanks with cryogenic fuel.

About three million liters of ultra-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen were due to be pumped into the spacecraft, but the process soon hit problems, with Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin later describing the issue as “not a manageable leak.”

The purpose of the Artemis 1 mission is to verify that the Orion capsule, which sits atop the SLS rocket, is safe to carry astronauts in the future.

Mannequins equipped with sensors are standing in for astronauts on the mission and will record acceleration, vibration and radiation levels.

– Apollo’s twin sister –

Once launched, it will take several days for the spacecraft to reach the Moon, flying around 60 miles (100 kilometers) at its closest approach.

The capsule will fire its engines to get to a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) of 40,000 miles beyond the Moon, a record for a spacecraft rated to carry humans.

The trip is expected to last around six weeks and one of its main objectives is to test the capsule’s heat shield, which at 16 feet in diameter is the largest ever built.

On its return to Earth’s atmosphere, the heat shield will have to withstand speeds of 25,000 miles per hour and a temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) — roughly half as hot as the Sun.

Artemis is named after the twin sister of the Greek god Apollo, after whom the first Moon missions were named.

Unlike the Apollo missions, which sent only white men to the Moon between 1969 and 1972, Artemis missions will see the first person of color and the first woman step foot on the lunar surface.

A successful Artemis 1 mission would come as a huge relief to the US space agency, after years of delays and cost overruns.

A government audit estimates the Artemis program’s cost will grow to $93 billion by 2025, with each of its first four missions clocking in at a whopping $4.1 billion per launch.

The next mission, Artemis 2, will take astronauts to the Moon without landing on its surface.

The crew of Artemis 3 is to land on the Moon in 2025 at the earliest, with later missions envisaging a lunar space station and a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.

A crewed trip to the red planet aboard Orion, which would last several years, could be attempted by the end of the 2030s.