We had announced the arrival of the third edition of the South Korean fair ART OnO. The event was indeed held from April 3 to 5, 2026, at the SETEC center.
The name ART OnO is an acronym that stands for «Art One and Only». The expression perhaps emphasizes the uniqueness of each artist’s work. It might also allude to the 1:1 relationship that often develops between the artwork and its potential viewer. We noticed a strong preference for painting and a tendency among artists to retreat into their inner world, studying the psychological states of being and their own emotions. Furthermore, many artists seem to hope for a return to nature and a fusion with the animal world.
We share our selection of stands.
Duarte Sequeira, a Portuguese gallery in Seoul
Duarte Sequeira is a Portuguese gallery that opened a new location, about three years ago, in Seoul. Since 2019, the gallery has also established a residency program at its Braga location and created a sculpture park with artists of the caliber of Julien Opie and Richard Long.
Among the artists we notice at the fair, Yooyun Yang works with diluted acrylic colors on Jangji — a traditional Korean handmade paper, derived from the bark of the mulberry tree —. She achieves a screen with distinct layers and textures rich in nuances. Through bold glimpses and a narrow visual plane, cut with the spatula of the brush, she transforms what we know into something unsettling and uncanny, giving us back the psychological landscape of anxiety and alienation inherent in contemporary life.
Nell Brookfield (Class of 1994, London), for her part, stands out for her chromatic freshness. She earned a degree in Anthropology at University College, a master’s degree at the Royal Drawing School, and attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She explores the absurdity of life, offering humorous and bizarre visions drawn from her daily experiences. She uses acrylic colors, oil, natural pigments, and pastels. Her compositions are the result of a cut: she creates a larger image from which she then removes a section. The texture of the paintings invites us to caress it. The subject, often female, interacts either with her double or with animals that could embody the role of spirit guides. The figures sometimes appear asleep or absorbed in thoughts-desires, other times caught in simple and symbolic actions. A woman in a cage embraces a swan, knocks on the doors of a tiny house on fire, crushes a pufferfish or presses it against her cheek.
Nicolas Krupp: the duo Monica Studer-Christoph Van den Berg
The Basel gallery presents the duo Studer – Van den Berg, together since the nineties. They are pioneers of Internet art in Switzerland and are also known for their installations and large-scale prints, rich in detail, that blend digital and analog spaces into immersive and sometimes interactive visual creations. In Halluc, we observe creatures and patterns that continuously change in a sort of ever-transforming psychedelic mandala. The video work, in fact, is not in a loop. A software created by the artists constantly proposes new images, drawing from a myriad of visual inputs and old photographs taken around the world by themselves. The creative couple asks: what would an artificial intelligence produce in a hallucinatory state?
https://www.nicolaskrupp.com/artists/monica-studer-christoph-van-den-berg
Jecza Gallery
The stand of Jecza Gallery (Timisoara & Bucharest) is composed almost 100% of Romanian artists, with the only exception of an Albanian artist.
We focus on the work of two artists. Radu Oreian (born in 1984 in Tarnaveni, Romania) creates narrative fragments inspired by ancient mythologies. His “Molecular Painting” are works in miniaturized format. The surface is brought to life by touches of paint, spherical confetti that weave color into the narrative, otherwise left only to the black thread of the drawing.
Paul Robas (born in 1989 in Romania) delves into, through portraiture, the ephemeral nature of memory and human experience. The 25 x 30 cm paintings are offered at 4,500 euros.
Artemin Gallery of Taipei
We select the gallery Artemin for the painting of Crystal Lupa, a Taiwanese artist born in California in 1989 and currently based in Taipei. She graduated in Women’s Fashion from Central Saint Martins in London. She expresses herself through a totemic language and surreal settings that host dreamlike figures. Her mysterious subjects blend Eastern mysticism and fantastic literature. She is interested in personal psychological states and archetypal figures, the study of the self, the unconscious both individual and collective. Additionally, she draws inspiration from ethnic diversity and plays on the metaphor of fertility. Dark shades alternate with bright passages and seem to exchange like in a photographic negative. As stated by the gallery director Ben Hsiao,
SPACE SO of Seoul and the promotion of Korean artists
SPACE SO, founded in Seoul in 2017, places Korean artists at the center of its mission.
The artist Yeji Seok creates surreal portraits in which the figures are out of scale. The bodies are swept away by air currents, currents, or gravity and appear grotesquely twisted or elongated. The pupils, exaggeratedly dilated, capture the gaze. Seok stages creatures endowed with an identity in constant change, depending on the environment and emotions.
The eyes are always the protagonists of the pictorial compositions of Bang Soyun. The artist works on subverting the hierarchy between digital reality and the physical world. Her works take on various forms, material or immaterial: paintings, videos, sculptures, and augmented reality. The artist mainly uses 3D modeling software, creating subordinate narratives. She studies the process of her own creative thinking and the image processing algorithms based on artificial intelligence.
Gana Art with the work of the Japanese Kawauchi Rikako
Founded in 1983, Gana Art is one of the first major art galleries opened in Korea. In addition to gallery exhibitions, it has organized public art projects, such as outdoor sculptures, installation works, and multimedia projects for museums, resorts, or large buildings. It has 4 locations, 3 in Seoul and one in Los Angeles. At the stand and in the Hannam location, it features works by the Japanese artist Kawauchi Rikako. The Blade of The Forest Within is a series composed of about thirty paintings. The artist plays with the layering of pigments and with the engraving of the surface using a spatula. The prevalence of magenta helps to filter reality, transforming it into a mimetic jungle. The bacchanal of hybrid creatures that populates the pictorial matter certainly does not conceal a horror vacui. The mark is cursive. Animals and exotic fruits, fragments of bodies and organs, emerge in the lush vegetation. The visual field is a bull field, excessively redundant.
Gallery Baton and the coccodrilli of Andi Fischer
In the stand of Gallery Baton on a pedestal stands a small bronze crocodile, which simulates wood carving. The animal is painted emerald green and is stylized like the Lacoste symbol. It is a work by the German artist Andi Fischer (born in 1987), also present in the gallery with a solo exhibition that ended on April 11. The works of Feil Good are bronze sculptures or large canvases where wild animals and birds share the space with emptiness. The color is applied with immediacy using oil pastels and pencil. Primary colors, ranges of greens (for the grass and the crocodiles’ armor) and blues, alternated with yellow, red, and black for the busts of crows and tigers. His style is characterized by a genuine naïve streak. Childlike drawings to speak of a return to nature. One of his works 208 × 178 cm is for sale on Artsy at $32K.
Rangi Gallery, the art space from Tanzania
Rangi Gallery is an art space open in Dar es Salaam that exhibits Tanzanian artists. A focal point for cultural exchange in the area, it offers a safe haven, a creative platform for local artists.
With the Rangi Nyumbani Residency program, the gallery aims to promote a culture of artistic exploration, collaboration, and community impact, celebrating the artistic heritage of Tanzania while welcoming global influences. It was founded by Lorna Mashiba Albou, a dynamic figure straddling law and art.
Theresia Masssawe is a self-taught emerging artist. Her paintings are offered at the price of 800 dollars each.
Valerie Asiimwe Amani (born in 1991 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a visual artist, writer, and researcher whose multidisciplinary practice focuses on the politics of place, memory, and embodiment.
The artist, who will participate in the Venice Biennale in the pavilion dedicated to Tanzania, blends mythology and inner sensations, drawing from the cosmologies of East Africa. They explore different techniques and materials, creating textile works and collages, alluding through stitching and layering to geopolitical systems, affective and social relationships.
She has collaborated for many years with art magazines such as Artribune, XIBT Contemporary, ArtApp, Insideart and Espoarte, preferring contemporary art in its many facets and media drifts.
