Where the phrase “gallery weekend” might once have euphemized a romantic indiscretion, or announced a Happening, it now connotes a program of events coordinated to attract a small but influential international audience to a city with aspirations to the status of a cultural hub. Korea’s contribution to this increasingly popular model—adopted in recent years in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Dublin, Vienna, and Warsaw, among others—was composed of three strands: a “showcase exhibition,” a series of talks and guided tours of an art fair, two concurrent biennials, and a selection of local galleries. The “showcase exhibition” brought together work from 20 South Korean galleries—from such established venues as Seoul’s Hakgojae and Kukje to younger ventures located in the chic Gangnam and Jongno districts—in an awkwardly proportioned exhibition space created by stacking several shipping containers one upon the other. It would have been too much under the circumstances to ask for the exhibition to cohere in aesthetic or conceptual terms, but it did succeed in highlighting some shared preoccupations. The most striking was a fixation on identity, whether individual, national, or the intersection of the two. Running along the three walls of a recess, Mari Kim’s quasi-psychedelic anime-style portraits insert kawaii female personae—her “Eyedolls”—into …