The Korea Artist Prize is an award program that supports artists who embody the potential and vision of the future for contemporary art in Korea. It is co-sponsored by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and SBS Culture Foundation. Every year, the Korea Artist Prize provides opportunities for four artists to develop and showcase new work. In doing so, it assumes the important responsibility of promoting new themes and discourse relevant to the times and essential in drawing the roadmap for contemporary art in Korea.
Currently in its 10th year since its inception, Korea Artist Prize 2021 has selected four artists, Kim Sangjin, Bang Jeong-A, Oh Min, and Choi Chan Sook, all domestically and internationally recognized for exploring various themes and mediums such as painting, video, installation, and sound. Kim Sangjin, who has consistently studied the relationship between technology and humans, presents video and installation works that visualize our changing perspectives on people and society that evolve from fast-changing technological developments. Bang Jeong-A is an artist interested in capturing obscurities behind everyday life. Her large-scale paintings reveal day-to-day life scenes of "the here and the now," the concealed realities lurking behind them and the sociopolitical landscape with invisible yet real powers-that-be. Oh Min has pored over the nature of time for a long time, deconstructing existing mediums of video, music, and performance, reconstructing them with renewed perceptions, and venturing into new territories. She takes fundamental elements of performance, such as light, camera, body, and space and unfolds them within an unconventional space, compelling her audience to question their perception of synchronic moments. Lastly, the Berlin-based artist Choi Chan Sook presents work revolving around her interest and research area of migration and movement. Through large-scale installations of video and sound, she explores the theme of memory concerning past events, documentation, and memory narratives.
This year's exhibition features artists with novel understanding and reinterpretations of reality and the ensuing changes during difficult times. The finalist of the Korea Artist Prize will be selected through a judging process during the exhibition period. It is our hope that this year's event will serve as an opportunity for celebration and reflection of Korean contemporary art.
Kim Sangjin
Lamps in video games use real electricity
An artist who has been exploring the themes of people and the world through various mediums and formats, Kim Sangjin presents Lamps in video games use real electricity, an exhibition of large-scale video installations, sound, and sculptures. Based on his longtime study of the human cognitive system, Kim rekindles our interest in its uncertainties and imperfections, prodding us onto uncharted virtual territories. He spotlights today's contemporary art by making visual through his work the human experience of living with and questioning the absurdities in our present reality.
Kim addresses the themes of "people and the world," which he has explored over a long period, by depicting the polarized human existence at the crossroads of real and virtual realms. His new work, Lo-fi Manifesto_Cloud Flex (2021), which takes center stage in the exhibition hall, is a visualization of the ordinary, everyday virtual reality that contrasts with the Hi-Fi based, fascinating, but fleeting virtual moments. Chroma Key Green (2021) is an astute representation of the dichotomy the color green represents today. The color symbolizes nature in our human-constructed environments of cities and societies, but in video productions, it indicates features that need to be obliterated to facilitate computer graphic work. Through the sharing platform of an exhibition, Kim reconstructs the diverse human experiences that arise with fast-growing virtual and digital experiences, including social media, cryptocurrency, and metaverse.
Bang Jeong-A
Heumul-heumul
Bang Jeong-A is an artist based in Busan who has consistently addressed the theme of "the here and the now" through her painting. She strives to relate on canvas the stories obscured behind the ordinary and familiar scenes of our contemporary society. In this exhibition, Bang features her paintings as the confluence of the flows of time and history that bring in drifting stories and events concealed behind everyday places. In bringing to the surface the overlooked past and unrecognized dangers, she urges us to take another closer look into our life and our surroundings.
Bang presents two different sections in the exhibition that represent her chosen theme of "Heumul-heumul," which describes a soft and mushy state. Korean Political Landscape, large-scale paintings that depict the rigidity of systems, structures, power, relationships, and other complicated Korean political contexts imbued in the ordinary landscape of everyday life; and A Plastic Ecosystem that epitomizes things that must not soften. Each section addresses the same theme but tells a different story. She shares her perspectives and experiences by inviting the audience into her "the here and the now," urging them to face the hidden realities and perils they encompass. Her paintings illustrate the theme of "Heumul-heumul" in diverse ways, depicting narratives that deliver a sense of crisis felt by individuals up against the powers that be.
Oh Min
Heterophony
Oh Min is an artist who explores the nature of time through experiments in various mediums such as music, sound, and performance. Oh expands the realm of the senses in her research of time. She studies the temporality, movement, and characteristics of light in performance and visual arts, delving into physical considerations affecting gaps in time and paradoxical contradictions that range from the perfect to the imperfect. Experimenting with time through its control, structure, and form, Oh has worked toward developing new methodologies. In Heterophony of Heterochrony (2021), she treats time as both raw material and format, raising questions from different angles on images and connections resulting from time-based arts. To an artist, the format and structure of an artwork represent their perspectives honed by extensive study and mastery. They also serve as a tool in awakening new sensations across genres and mediums.
Heterophony consists of 5-channel screen projections with sound installations to present images and sounds as well as light and body in synchronic moments that culminate in synaesthetic experiences. In music, the word heterophony refers to multiple individuals simultaneously performing a single melody to create melodic variations that coexist and synchronize. Through examining how audiences move through an exhibition space and experience visual images, Oh questions the role of material and format in the visual arts. It is as if she transforms the exhibition space into a performance stage or lab. Although each visitor spends their own time here, multiple people experiencing contemporaneous time together within the same place can share a heterophonic moment.
Choi Chan Sook
qbit to adam
Choi Chan Sook has been building up a visual vocabulary revolving around the themes of movement, migration, and community. She presents in various formats diverse perspectives and narratives pertaining to her position in life and existence. Through a long personal history of emigration, she expresses interest in migration experiences at both physical and emotional levels, particularly issues surrounding land as a place for living and as property. 60 Ho (2020) features stories about women living in Yangji-ri, a village near the Demilitarized Zone formed for propagandistic purposes. Through their stories, Choi brings to spotlight the power dynamics surrounding ownership of land. qbit to adam (2021) embodies the artist's longtime study of land pertaining to our physical bodies that walk on it and our relationship to it as a possession.
In this exhibition, Choi takes her long-standing focus on marginalized people and neglected stories one step further by addressing the land and body through the lens of personal history and memories. From mining coals to mining cryptocurrency, the different stories told through video and sound in qbit to adam unearth the irony-laden human history of labor and material possession. The different narratives in the 4-channel video installation unite and separate within the same space, reestablishing the interrelationships within. At the same time, these images are projected onto the copper-hued floor of Gallery 2, encouraging another opportunity for reflection. Choi probes into how the virtual spaces and systems in our midst come together with existing narratives to create visceral sensations, and she challenges us to question the true nature of these newly experienced sensations derived from those places.
