SEOUL.- The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea presents the Korea Artist Prize until Sunday, 23 March 2025, as an event co-organized with the SBS Foundation.

The Korea Artist Prize has established itself as the premier award system in Korean art since its establishment in 2012. By honoring and providing exhibition opportunities to promising established artists, it has contributed to broadening the base of Korean contemporary art and laying the foundation for its advancement in the international context. In keeping with institutional improvements realized on the system’s 10th anniversary last year, Korea Artist Prize 2024 is providing condensed glimpses of each finalist artist’s body of work by exhibiting older works alongside newer ones that reflect recent critical perspectives, while elevating the public’s understanding through artist/judges dialogues to be made public on and offline in early 2025.

The artists receiving support through the Korea Artist Prize in 2024— Jiyoung Yoon, Hayoun Kwon, Yang Jung-uk, and Jane Jin Kaisen—have each reflected in new ways on the contemporary era through their own varied voices. Major interests of these artists include psychological dynamics, everyday lives, historical memory, myth, and ritual. They subvert conventional ideas and capture attention through perspectives that explore the most intimate realms of the human experience and the most distant worlds and through their methodologies that alternate between fact and fiction to remember or to represent preferred ways of life. Korea Artist Prize 2024 seeks to share these artists’ diverse and alluring stories with viewers while examining the issues captured within them.

Jiyoung Yoon is an artist who makes use of sculpture’s nature as a medium with both inner and outer aspects, visualizing the attitudes that individuals acquire due to external incidents and circumstances, along with their efforts to achieve a “better” state. The exhibition presents various older works that illustrate Yoon’s experiments with the sculpture medium, as well as a newer works, including Just, You, One, Face (2024). Originating with a wax figure presented as an offering when making a wish, Just, You, One, Face is a sculpture that captures the feelings of friends wishing for each other's well-being. Here, the artist reinterprets the plasticity of her material—its ability to change shape—as an active force capable of accommodating and transforming external actions.

Hayoun Kwon creates a new experience of memories by enlisting virtual reality (VR) technology to reexamine the concepts of memory and recording. In addition to three older works that illustrate the artist’s critical perspective on recording and memory in different ways, the exhibition also shares her new work The Guardians of Jade Mountain (2024). The Guardians of Jade Mountain is a VR installation work that uses the beautiful natural environment of Taiwan’s Yushan (Jade Mountain) to present the story of a real-life Japanese anthropologist and Chief Aliman of the Bunun clan (Taiwan's Aborigines) who became friends. Their story transcends distinctions between fiction/reality and history/memory to provide an occasion for newly examining the actual relationships obscured by the larger concept of the “enemy.”

Yang Jung-uk presents moving sculptures and stories that originate in moments captured from everyday life, expressing an image of the life that he aspires to. His contributions to the exhibition consist of works that focus on individuals and landscapes, showing the meaning of life expressed in actions that are endlessly repeated by people in a place between hardship and hope. His new work Someone I Know, in His Garden I’ve Never Seen (2024) uses a field as a setting to tell a story about solace achieved through the marks someone left behind. Through the artist’s imagination, the natural elements of water, light, and wind transform into moving shapes for the viewer, together with the story of a son encountering the garden of his deceased father.

Jane Jin Kaisen is well known for her poetic, performative video works, which boast a powerful visual impact. For this exhibition, she presents Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) (2024), a series of seven video works, including three new creations. This exhibition marks the first time that Ieodo is being presented in its entirety. Based on longstanding collaborations with Jeju Island’s local community, it offers a condensed glimpse at Kaisen’s multilayered research into the island’s nature, history, culture, and contemporary issues. The work starts with the dynamic spiral screens and the gestures of various figures upon them, as it clearly illustrates the artist’s interest in performativity.

The final winner of the Korea Artist Prize for 2024 will be named in February 2025 following a public talk program and second round screening on the artworks that will take place with both Korean and overseas panel members during the exhibition. Visitors will be able to attend this public talk between artists and judges, and the proceedings will also be presented online afterward. The finalist named as winner of the 2024 Korea Artist Prize will receive an additional KRW 10 million in support. A documentary spotlighting the artworks of all four supported artists and the winning finalist will be aired on the SBS network and cable channels.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “Korea Artist Prize 2024 is Korea’s premier exhibition to support the artists who will guide the future of Korean contemporary art. We hope that the exhibition serves as an opportunity to communicate the critical perspectives of contemporary artists to a wider audience.”