Dahoon Nam - Jeff Koons Special Sale (Performance): Basel Social Club 2025

As part of Art Basel 2025, K&L Museum is proud to present its collaboration as an exhibitor of Jeff Koons Special Sale by Dahoon Nam—an incisive performance and installation featured at Basel Social Club 2025. This special event reflects K&L Museums’s ongoing commitment to supporting critical, boundary-pushing artistic practices and fostering dialogue around the role of art in contemporary society.
In Jeff Koons Special Sale, Dahoon Nam critiques how the art world transforms artworks into commodities, stripping them of meaning and reducing their value to brand identity, quantity, and resale potential. The performance features three performers working assembly-line style: one inflates a balloon, another twists it into a dog, and a third mounts it on a disposable aluminum plate—parodying Koons’s Balloon Dog (Plate). Made with cheap, ephemeral materials, the piece satirizes the overproduction and inflated prices of editioned artworks, exposing how symbolic value in contemporary art can become detached from the artist’s labor and intention. Rather than rejecting the art market, Nam questions its excesses, proposing a value system rooted in uniqueness, visible effort, and context.
This critique continues in a companion sculpture titled Dom(estic) Pérignon Balloon Venus, a rough, hand-carved styrofoam reinterpretation of Koons’s luxury-branded Balloon Venus. Replacing Dom Pérignon with locally brewed craft beer from Basel, Nam shifts the focus from global prestige to local identity and unpolished, human craftsmanship. Both works are offered for sale at drastically reduced prices—not as ironic props, but as deliberate counterpoints that ask: what is truly being purchased in name-brand art? For Nam, restoring meaning in art requires not only mindful creation, but also a public willing to engage with artworks as bearers of intention, labor, and lived experience—not as speculative assets. Together, Jeff Koons Special Sale and Dom(estic) Pérignon Balloon Venus do more than critique—they offer a vision for a more balanced, ethical approach to the circulation and reception of contemporary art.