The 89th ARTCaffè hosted Joon Yub Lee. We had people representing 10 different countries in the living room of Seoul, with an audience tuning in online from the US, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Dubai, and South Korea.Director of Gallery Shilla in Seoul since 2021, Joon shared his story from both a professional and a very personal point of view.

Starting from the beginning of his career, Joon showed the progressive approach he took during the art fairs through bold choices. “What I did was quite progressive. At my first art fair, I had a closed booth. In a fair, we have to show something to sell, but we actually claimed that during the fair the booth would have been closed. That's how I became a little famous in this city. After, in another fair, I sold the bananas as a parody of Maurizio Cattelan’s, starting at 30 US dollars. We took into account that the cost of the bananas, the booth fee, and the duct tape add up to about 30 US dollars. You could basically name your own price. Because of this, I became a little more famous as the guy who sold the bananas at the fair. My recent adventure was ‘The Great Shit Show’, again during an art fair. It was actually quite an important exhibition in Korea. We displayed one original Manzoni’s artist shit, which was canned in the 1960s, along with works by Sung Neung Kyung and newly made cans, containing the artist’s shit, the collector's shit, the director’s shit… We used a new technology to preserve it. There was even mine, and somebody bought it.”

Then, Joon went back to the origins of Gallery Shilla, introducing the founder, his father, and the early days in which he exhibited Dansehwa artists, when they were still not the phenomenon they became today. “My father opened Gallery Shilla in Daegu in 1992. We have held many Dansaekhwa exhibitions. Back then, Dansaekhwa movement was not as famous as it is now.”In 1992, there was no Daegu City Museum, and his father, a successful businessman in the chemical industry, opened the gallery not to make a profit but to be a patron of the art. When asked to continue his legacy on the gallery side, Joon first rejected it. “Based on what I saw from my father, the most important thing for a gallerist is a passion for art. But I didn’t have that, and art was actually linked to many traumas during my childhood. The only reason my parents fought was because my father secretly collected art, and my mother systematically found it out. I ran away to Mexico City, where I worked really happily for three years. I wanted to be involved in the jamon business because I studied in Spain before, and there I found that making jamon was my true passion.”In 2020, though, his father convinced him to go back to Korea, where Joon ended up being involved in the gallery business. “At the beginning, I was really healthy. But my father has a different idea of how to successfully run the gallery, the stress grew bigger and bigger, and I ended up gaining lots of weight.”

The first main challenge Joon had to deal with, as a gallerist, was how to quantify aesthetics. “Aesthetic value is not quantifiable. How can I decide the price? And what is the aesthetic value I'm selling to the clients? I felt I had to be quite responsible regarding this quantification. I was asking myself: As a gallerist, what am I selling? Stocks? Culture? Expensive wall paper? Identity?”With all those questions in his mind, he moved on to the art business. He opened his first space in Seoul in 2020, moved to a new one in 2021, expanded to a bigger space in Samcheong in 2022, and then opened another in Itaewon in 2024. “The one in Itaewon is my dream space because on the first floor, I'm making jamon and showing art inside the exhibition site. The second floor is my living room, and the third floor is my house. So now we have four spaces in Korea: one in Daegu and three in Seoul.”

“I gained quite an economic success. To me, that means that the Korean art market and Korean art society are healthy because the people—that 10% of people who throw the same question I do—actually support me, and the idea of art as culture, of collecting art not as an investment but as a patron.”The path hasn’t been easy because art is for Joon a family business, and he had to deal with the gap between his generation and his father’s. “When I hosted an opening party during Frieze in 2022, I wore a Joseon King costume and invited everybody. My father was furious. He wasn't happy to participate in these events, we fought a lot, but he helped me anyway. The family united there and celebrated together.”

"My father also rejected the closed booth idea. But then, he helped me a lot to make a design for the new exhibition space, and together we built many connections. Today, we argue a lot, but we found a way of communicating.”Fast-forward to today, and Joon realized his father, as getting old, is more and more relying on him. This brought to a new project, what he called “our last expansion,” to reunite the family business in one, huge space.