Sky, 2026, oil on canvas, 189 × 378 cm 

Tattoo, 2026, oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm Membrane, 2026, oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm

Heaven, 2026, oil on canvas, 90 × 90 cm

Echo, 2026, oil on canvas, 121.1 × 87.45 cm Site-specific wall painting, executed on site across the triangular-prism walls of the booth

© Minhee Kim. Courtesy of the artist and CON_. High-resolution images are available for press upon request.

CON_ is pleased to present a solo presentation by Seoul-based artist Minhee Kim in the Focus section of Frieze Seoul 2026 (Booth F05), running from Wednesday, September 2 to Saturday, September 5, 2026, at COEX, Seoul.

Kim has long turned her attention to the idealized images of women shaped by contemporary media—K-pop, anime, internet culture—and to the social forces that lie behind them. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, she sets flawless, smooth skin against raw, disrupted texture, holding beauty and rupture in a precarious balance. Her recent work has taken a radical turn: images that appear fragmented, repeated, and shattered, recalling the visual states of glitch, error, and lag.

The presentation is built around a site-specific wall painting, executed on site by the artist across the triangular-prism walls of the booth, together with a group of new paintings from 2026: Sky, Tattoo, Membrane, Heaven, and Echo. Extending the mural practice she began with Body Landscape (2025), Kim takes on a paradox here: the attempt to free herself from a fixed iconography while never fully escaping it, a state in which liberation and control coexist. Rather than resolving this contradiction, she confronts it directly and allows both forces to occupy the same surface. In CON_'s booth, this landscape of discord expands into the tensions between body and spirit, the PC and the non-PC, the profane and the sacred.

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Fair: Frieze Seoul 2026, Focus section
Booth: F05Artist: Minhee Kim
Dates:  2026.9.2 (WED) – 2026.9.5 (SAT)
Venue: COEX, Gangnam, Seoul

Presented by: CON_ @con_tokyo_
Web：https://www.contokyo.com/
IG：https://www.instagram.com/con_tokyo_

Minhee Kim @guilyuk

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1991. Lives and works in Seoul. Completed her BFA in Painting at Sejong University in 2014, followed by her MFA in Painting at Hongik University in 2019.

Kim's practice focuses on the idealized images of women shaped by contemporary media—K-pop, anime, and internet culture—and explores the social dynamics that lie beneath them. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, she renders the body through a contrast between flawless, smooth skin and rough, raw texture, striking a balance between beauty and rupture. Desire, shame, and the pressures concealed beneath perfection rise to the surface; while referencing the images of beauty widely circulated in Korea, her work also reflects the artist's own sense of unconsciously drawing closer to those figures. Through motifs of transformation, glitch, and the reconstructed body, her paintings simultaneously reflect the allure of beauty and youth in Korean society and the price they exact, unsettling our perception.

Selected exhibitions include Clumsy Seamless (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025), Supper Club (H Queen's, Hong Kong, 2025), Berserker (Museumhead, Seoul, 2024), NEURO HARD (CON_, Tokyo, 2024), Hysteria: Contemporary Realism Painting (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), Natural Born Odds (Salihara Arts Center, Jakarta, 2023), Beyond Human (Lupo, Milan, 2023), and Funky-Function (Daegu Museum of Art, Daegu, 2022), among others. She was a resident at Art Omi, New York, in 2025, and has received the Art Support Program grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2018, 2019, 2020, 2024).

Minhee Kim: Emancipatory Self-Exploitation, Born Only of Wounds and Tears
— On the Occasion of Minhee Kim's Presentation at Frieze Seoul 2026
Jieon Lee 

Wounds and tears do not necessarily bring pain. Where a wound has healed, new flesh grows stronger; on a face washed by tears, nothing remains. Minhee Kim's paintings take shape as the residue left in the wake of their passing.

In her own words, her practice arises from the personal experience of being exposed to a culture in which a particular ideal of feminine beauty operates as a social norm. From this starting point she examines women's self-representation and the complex emotional responses embedded within it: desire, lack, and fixation on the idealized body.*1 Her early paintings relied on photographs and directly observed subjects, suggesting a mode of representation that inevitably arrived at predictable outcomes. In her past solo exhibitions Okinawa Fantasy (2018, Hapjungjigu) and Ghost Bikini (2019, Out_Sight), filled with virgin ghosts and uncanny landscapes, the artist layered an imagination under her own control over the represented scene, ultimately completing the image. Consider, however, her recent solo exhibition Berserker (2024, Museumhead). In contrast to earlier works that layered imagination and metaphor over reality, here she made a radical turn toward images that appear fragmented, repeated, and shattered, evoking the visual states of glitch, error, and lag. In that exhibition she depicted the female berserker as an enigmatic mythical archetype, presented as a wounded heroine. The body of the ferocious female warrior is at once glorified and deconstructed, navigating a delicate balance between self-expression and external desire.*2 For Kim, then, the pursuit of an unattainable ideal of womanhood—the process of striding boldly toward it and inevitably falling short—is embedded equally in her life and in her painting.

Turning to the works shown in Clumsy Seamless (2025, Kumho Museum of Art), we encounter Body Landscape (2025), a mural depicting the torso of an angelic warrior. The mural is defined by deliberate blankness. Its emptiness arises not only from the physical expanse of the wall itself but also from Kim's own proposition that a work is completed precisely through incompleteness, through the refusal to fill in what is left open. Skin Landscape (2025), placed beside the mural, appears instead to choose incompleteness through fragmentation rather than blankness. As the two titles ending in "Landscape" suggest, she faithfully brings to the surface the errors and residues that emerge across the material and immaterial worlds, along with the collisions between them and the painter. This negotiation continues in the mural for her presentation at Frieze Seoul 2026. Here Kim takes on a paradox: attempting to free herself from a fixed iconography while being unable to escape it entirely, a state in which liberation and control coexist. Rather than resolving this contradiction, she confronts it head-on and allows both forces to occupy the same surface. These frictions are not blurred; they persist. In CON_'s solo booth for Minhee Kim, this landscape of discord expands into tensions between body and spirit, the PC and the non-PC, the profane and the sacred. She describes the works in this presentation as an exploration of shifting states that take shape as digital images are translated into painting. According to the artist, Sky (2026), the largest work in the presentation, is formed in a manner similar to Skin Landscape (2025), in that fragmented forms surface together as they intermingle. Unlike the earlier work, in which a single figure seemed to spread in every direction, Sky places on either side of a resolute face forms suggesting mechanical viscera, as if peering inside a ribcage, and a pair of high-heeled legs that seem to hover precariously in midair. The tension between desire and reality, between an unattainable ideal and an irreconcilable present, unfolds across the picture plane like a diorama. The central figure has sky-blue eyes painted over her own; her gaze, directed from below to above, lends the image an unsettling precariousness. This uneasy fusion and hybridity continues in Tattoo (2026). Drawing on the way David Cronenberg's films—Naked Lunch (1991), The Fly (1986)—weave together objects, humans, and insects, placing their characters in scenes where hallucination and reality are hard to distinguish, Kim fragments an assemblage of front and back, human and non-human, and attempts to translate it into a single field of halftone dots. Finally, Heaven (2026), within its vast and intricately layered confusion, seems to reflect the artist herself and the countless emotions of the countless beings that surround her. As the image splits into ever-smaller fragments and fissures filled with color and vein-like strands of hair open up, the portrait of a weeping woman emerges from between them.

Tears embody neither joy nor sorrow completely. What they reflect, rather, is a transformation that sheds a layer of skin; the irony of longing for an ideal while standing firmly in reality; and a vision of femininity embodied by the artist herself, who must endure this same state of confusion. In this sense, tears mark a movement toward the new—a movement of liberation through self-exploitation, accompanied by the fissures born of the wounds and fragmentation that tears bring.

*1: Minhee Kim, "Artist's Note" (2026).
*2: Excerpted from the curatorial statement for Berserker (2024, Museumhead), written by Hojeong Heo