Paul Cox made the everyday monumental at Shinsegae Lounge, Frieze Seoul 2026

There is something quietly radical about paying attention to the everyday. At Frieze Seoul 2026, Shinsegae Group invited visitors to do just that, presenting 336 works by French artist Paul Cox in a meditation on landscape, repetition and the passing of time. As one of South Korea's foremost retail and lifestyle enterprises, Shinsegae Group has long cultivated a multifaceted presence across retail, hospitality, and culture.

The presentation inaugurated Shinsegae Lounge at COEX, created to mark the beginning of the Shinsegae group’s five-year partnership as Headline Partner of Frieze Seoul. Rather than simply providing a place to retreat from the pace of the fair, the lounge was designed to draw on Shinsegae’s longstanding relationship with art and culture to create a space for looking, lingering and discovery.

At its centre was ‘L’Immensité du Quotidien: The Monumental Everyday’, bringing together 336 works from Cox’s Diary series for their first public presentation as a complete body of work.

Born in Paris and now working between Burgundy and the French capital, Cox has built a deliberately multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, drawing, graphic design, publishing, theatre and installation. His fascination with systems, seriality and visual language runs throughout his work, alongside an enduring interest in the landscapes and environments that surround him.

The Diary works on view at Shinsegae Lounge were created over a four-month period during the spring and summer of 2026. Working in gouache on identically sized sheets of paper, Cox recorded impressions of landscape, light, colour and time through a process of repeated observation both outward and inward. Familiar forms reappear, but subtle changes in palette and composition mean no two paintings are quite the same.

Seen individually, the works are intimate and immediate; assembled together, they became something altogether more expansive. Repetition built rhythm, while small reflections accumulated into a monumental landscape. One work, Diary 16 05 26, escaped the confines of the exhibition entirely, reproduced at large scale across the exterior of Shinsegae Lounge.

It is an approach that feels particularly resonant within the accelerated environment of an international art fair. Amid the constant movement of Frieze Seoul, Cox’s work asked visitors to slow down and reconsider the value of what might otherwise go unnoticed.

That philosophy also reflects a much longer story for Shinsegae. Its relationship with the arts stretches back to 1963, when Shinsegae Gallery opened as the first dedicated art gallery established by a Korean retailer. In the decades since, art has moved beyond the traditional gallery setting and into the group’s wider environments.

At Shinsegae Department Store’s Main Branch, Trinity Garden brings contemporary sculpture into a rooftop garden overlooking Namsan Mountain, while Starfield Library combines culture with public space. Initiatives including the Starfield Library Art Project and Art Tours at Josun Hotels & Resorts further extend this idea across the group.

Shinsegae Lounge brings that archive of cultural patronage into a new context. At future iterations of Frieze Seoul, historic commitment and contemporary practice will continue to meet in a space that considers art not as something separate from everyday life, but as something capable of transforming how we experience it.

Frieze Seoul 2026 ran at COEX, Seoul, 2–5 September 2026

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