New and Major Works by Four "Artist of the Year" Finalists on Display
Shedding Light on the "Invisible" in Diverse Ways
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in collaboration with the SBS Foundation for Culture, will open the "Artist of the Year 2025" exhibition at its Seoul branch on August 29. The Artist of the Year Award is an annual program that selects four artists (or teams) to support the production of new works and exhibitions, providing each artist (or team) with a 50 million won grant for their creative activities. Among these four sponsored artists (or teams), one will be selected as the "Artist of the Year" through a "Jury-Artist Dialogue" in mid-October, with the winner to be announced in January next year. The dialogue process will be open to the public, and the selected "Artist of the Year" will receive an additional 10 million won grant for their creative work.
The sponsored artists for "Artist of the Year 2025" are Kim Yeongeun, Lim Youngju, Kim Jipyeong, and the team Unmake Lab. This year's exhibition will showcase both new works and representative existing pieces from each artist. The award-winning artists (or teams) share a commonality in that they explore intangible existences through diverse media and languages. Following the question "How can the invisible world beyond boundaries be revealed?", they traverse themes such as sound and politics, tradition and East Asian painting, superstition and science, and the relationship between technology and humanity, critically reinterpreting conventional ways of perceiving the world.
Kim Yeongeun critically examines the relationship between power and ideology through the act of listening. The artist regards sound as a medium that preserves traces of history and culture, playing a crucial role in shaping our identities. Through this, Kim explores how the sounds we encounter in our lives operate within political and social contexts. Notable works include "Go Back To Your" (2025), a video piece edited as a first-person sound narrative using 1980s curfew sirens and radio listening records of spies crossing between North and South Korea, and "To Future Listeners III" (2025), which transforms a song recorded by an Irish male immigrant in the early 20th century into the voices of female immigrants. Kim stated, "I arranged various senses of sound narratively," adding, "In cases where official historical records are absent, I recreated them virtually to reconstruct their inner meanings."
Exhibition view of artist Lim Youngju's gallery. Visitors can lie down directly. Photo by Seo Mideum
Lim Youngju visualizes the structure of intangible 'faith' through books, videos, websites, installations, and performances. The major work "The Late" (2023-2025) consists of 12 videos and sound pieces played over an hour, harmonizing with the exhibition hall that evokes the atmosphere of an imaginary 'empty tomb' inspired by the Korean tradition of 'gamyo' (mock graves). Visitors can experience being at the boundary between life and death in a space staged like a tomb where past, present, and future intermingle. Lim encouraged, "I hope you experience something new by being alone, crouched in an empty tomb filled with old relics."
Kim Jipyeong interprets the concept and techniques of East Asian painting as a system, presenting them as an open narrative not bound by the past. Through series such as "Polyphonic Chorus" (2023-2025), which gathers marginalized figures like grandmothers, clowns, and shamans, and "Landscape Album" (2023-2025), which reconstructs utopian ideals in East Asian art using landscapes removed from traditional folding screens, Kim evokes the perception of "tradition" that, though not always visible, still operates beneath the surface. The highlight is "Cosmic Turtle" (2025), a woodblock piece reconstructing the turtle myth into eight stories. Kim explained, "This work was inspired by seeing a turtle that died after consuming anti-North Korean leaflets off the west coast in 2018," adding, "The turtle is a mythological being at the origin of writing, and the fact that such a creature died after ingesting the language of propaganda serves as a warning to modern civilization."
Unmake Lab is a team formed by Choi Bitna and Song Suyeon in 2016. Since 2020, they have consistently presented works that subvert human-centered perception systems revealed by artificial intelligence. Utilizing datasets, computer vision, and generative neural network technologies, they focus on exposing the flaws in AI-predicted visions of the future. Among their works, the piece in which various stones are scanned and analyzed by AI is particularly striking. Regarding this, the two artists explained, "The endless punishment of Sisyphus rolling stones has long been seen as a clich? of repetition and oppression inflicted on humans, but this time, we tried to think from the perspective of the stone rather than the human," adding, "This work exercises the imagination of shifting the narrative from a human-centered focus to the consciousness of the stone."
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and the SBS Foundation for Culture are supporting the international activities of past sponsored artists through the "Artist of the Year Overseas Activity Fund." Projects supported by this fund include Hong Youngin's solo exhibition at Kunsthal Extra City in Belgium in 2023, Park Hyesu's participation in "Sharjah Biennial 2023" the same year, Kwon Byungjun's invitation to perform at the IMPACT Festival in Belgium in 2024, Kim Ahyoung's solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in Germany, and Lee Seulgi's solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery in the UK, among many other international projects. A documentary highlighting the artistic worlds of this year's sponsored and award-winning artists will also be produced and broadcast on SBS terrestrial and cable channels.
Kim Sunghui, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, stated, "'Artist of the Year' is a leading domestic exhibition that gauges the experimental trends of Korean contemporary art together with artists addressing the most pressing issues of our time," adding, "I hope 'Artist of the Year 2025' will provide an opportunity to understand the landscape of Korean contemporary art in greater depth and serve as a platform for new discourses." The exhibition will run until February 1, 2026.
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