Individual artists worth looking at, and what their record does and does not tell you.
What 104 Yun Hyong-keun lots sold at Korean auction between 2022 and 2026 show: the title tells you the decade, a 1970s Umber-Blue makes about three times a later canvas of the same size, and the yearly median doubled for reasons that have nothing to do with price.
What 229 Kim Whanki lots sold at Korean auction between 2022 and 2026 show: canvas at eight times paper, subject over size, oil on newspaper priced almost like a standard item, and prints that are mostly posthumous editions.
How Lee Ufan paints, what the 2016 forgery case settled and did not, and what 585 lots sold at Korean auction between 2022 and 2026 show: canvas at six times paper, large canvases down a third, and twelve matched print groups that all fell.
The ten highest prices Park Seo-Bo has made at Korean auction, his record abroad, and what 298 print and edition sales from 2022 to 2026 show about each kind of Ecriture print.
From 2022 to 2026, 277 Yayoi Kusama lots sold at Korean auction. Seventy were resin pumpkins and printed towels, and her pumpkin screenprints have not risen since 2022.
Every David Hockney that sold at Korean auction from 2022 to 2026 was an edition or a book. One My Window print sold thirteen times, and its price moved seven months before he died.
A Genzken diptych made $258,000 on an $80,000 estimate at Phillips in July 2026, the largest multiple in the sale. Measured by area it is the cheapest Basic Research painting of the five whose prices can be traced.
Three numbers from the same four years of Kim Sunwoo's auction record: the record high up 88 percent, the median painting down 26 percent, and a like for like canvas up 34 percent. Only one of them is about price.
Lee Bae's originals rose 89 percent in four years while his editions fell 14 percent. The gap between those two numbers is the most useful thing his record has to teach, and it applies to artists at any price.
A Lee Jinwoo canvas hammered at $97,000 in August 2026 and the rise got reported as 73 percent in three months. Measured by area it was 36 percent, and his entire auction record is twenty lots deep.
One Youngju Joung silkscreen hammered at exactly 2 million won in April 2023, June 2023, July 2023 and December 2025. Over the same stretch her large paintings went from $67,000 to $130,000.
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