Changes in the Korea Artist Prize Program in 2023
Launched in 2012, the Korea Artist Prize is a noteworthy annual exhibition held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), and a major award program that recognizes achievements in Korea’s contemporary art scene. For more than a decade, the award program has been highlighting the possibilities and vision of contemporary Korean art through exhibitions, awards, and continuous sponsorship for promising mid-career artists, and the MMCA made major improvements to this program for its tenth anniversary in 2022. To begin, we strengthened production support for artists and expanded the scale of sponsorship. In addition, by exhibiting not only newly commissioned works but also previous major works created by the award nominee artists, we strengthened our exhibition planning and deepened the thematic consciousness of artists’ works and storytelling about their art worlds. Lastly, the final jury deliberation process has been radically transformed to now include the chance to have an internationally influential jury engage in open dialogue with the nominee artists. Through these newly added jury-artist dialogue opportunities, which will take place in February 2024, we hope that the Korea Artist Prize will not only serve as an award program but also as a venue where contemporary Korean art and the international art world can meet, and that the people who visit the museum will have the opportunity to more actively engage with contemporary art from Korea and around the world.
Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. She has had solo exhibitions at MUAC, Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, and CAMSTL and has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021) Jeju and Liverpool Biennial (2022-2023). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-2022), and she is a Senior Critic at Yale sculpture department.
Sojung Jun has worked in a variety of media, including video, sound, sculpture, installation, performance, and books. In her solo exhibitions As You Like It (2010, Insa Art Space) and The Other Side of the Other Side (2012, Gallery Factory), she began to think deeply about how to bring out the stories of individuals who are obsessed with one thing or another, as well as those who are obscured by events, and in her solo exhibition Ruins (2015, Doosan Gallery) she questioned the attitude of making art through “everyday experts.” Since then, she has shared her questions with collaborators from various fields, including music, dance, criticism, architecture, and literature, and actively sought to expand our senses, holding solo exhibitions such as Kiss Me Quick (2017, SongEun ArtSpace), a contemplation on movement, and Au Magasin de Nouveautés (2020, Atelier Hermès), which explores the contemporary sense of speed through the medium of the eponymous poem by Yi Sang. In the past, she has been awarded the Villa Vassilieff-Pernod Ricard Fellowship, the Hermes Foundation Missulsang, the Gwangju Biennale’s Noon Art Prize, and the SongEun Art Award’s Grand Prize.
Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and Seoul. His work frequently engages the legacy of transnational queer histories, particularly as they intersect with art history. Lee has exhibited internationally including at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023), de Appel, Amsterdam (2023); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020); and PARTICIPANT INC, New York (2019). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2021); and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021). He has also participated in New Museum Triennial, New York (2021), and 13th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju (2021). Lee’s work is in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; The Getty, Los Angeles; among others.
Byungjun Kwon started his musical career as a singer-songwriter in the early 1990s, and released six albums covering the minimalist house from Alternative Rock. Since 2000, he has demonstrated his musical talents in various cultural fields such as movie soundtracks, fashion shows, dance, theater, and Korean traditional music. Since 2008, he has been a hardware engineer at STEIM, an experimental electronic musical instrument research and development institution based in the Netherlands. After returning to Korea in 2011, he has been active as a hardware researcher related to sound to date, and has developed and utilized new musical instruments and stage devices to produce dramatic ‘scenes,’ creating and directing new media performances that encompass music, theater, and art. He is a leading player in multi-channel sound installation using Ambisonic technology and now directing robotic mechanical theater.
* Byungjun Kwon, Forest of Subtle Truth (2023) operates every afternoon 2-5 pm.
* Every Wednesday and Satureday 6-9pm, Gallery 4(Byungjun Kwon) repair work is scheduled.
