SEOUL.- Korea Artist Prize is a leading contemporary artist support program and award system co-hosted by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and SBS Foundation since 2012, selecting four artists (teams) each year to support the production and exhibition of new works. For its 10th anniversary in 2023, to provide a (non-)linear and three-dimensional view of the artist’s world, a change was made by showcasing existing major works alongside new works.
Featured artists at Korea Artist Prize 2025 are Kim YoungEun, Im Youngzoo, Kim Jipyeong, and Unmake Lab. Kim YoungEun places the act of listening at the center of her work. Beyond a sensory experience, listening is a political practice where power and ideology intersect, and an ethical approach to retracing the traces of various voices and sounds that have been constructed and erased throughout history. In this process, sound becomes a spatial and sculptural medium; a social device that operates within the sensory shifts triggered by modernization.
Im Youngzoo’s works always begin by questioning the conditions of incurring “belief.” She traces the intersection of old superstitions embedded in Korean society and modern science and technology, and reflects on the structure that constitutes the invisible energy of “belief.” Her artwork is a philosophical and aesthetic endeavor that asks what belief emerges as objects of faith, and what perceptual shift occurs when they are connected to technology. Im Youngzoo superimposes individual narratives and collective memories, allowing traditional superstition, pseudoscience, apocalypticism, and the latest technology to float in the same space and time. This hybrid work oscillates between documentary reality and theatrical devices, sometimes utilizing technical glitches as tools, and rewriting belief paths in atypical ways.
Kim Jipyeong’s work unravels two layers of time—past and present—that the word “tradition” implies, and explores the potential of lost things. The East Asian art forms that she has been exploring, such as Chaekgado, Sansuhwa, Goeseokdo, and Janghwang (folding screens, hanging scrolls, scrolls, and picture books), are not fixed art historical categories, but rather variable matrices overlaid with the interests and desires of different eras. By delicately deconstructing these complex layers, Kim Jipyeong adopts a critical stance that questions the very idea of Dongyanghwa (Eastern painting) itself.
Unmake Lab has a history of subverting the social myths and visual order that technological advancements create, as well as the anthropocentric perceptions of technology. More recently, they have been using artificial intelligence as a lens through which to examine ecological crises, and through the humor, irony, and even macabre that they portray, they have been penetrating deeper into the unconscious of technological society. They do not trust or welcome technology, but rather focus on its ability to disrupt our perceptions of what we have come to call “natural.”
