Korea Artist Prize is an award system and one of SBS Foundation’s integral social contribution projects established to promote the arts field in partnership with MMCA, Korea. This award follows the path of MMCA’s Artist of the Year exhibitions, which was held from 1995 to 2010 and hence it has been re-established to discover and sponsor artists who have ardently persisted in paving their own way to artistic success, thus providing an avenue for the advancement of Korean contemporary art.
Korea Artist Prize selects maximum of four artists (or teams of artists) as ‘SBS Foundation sponsored Artists’ with latent potential through the first-round evaluation process. These exhibiting artists will receive 40 million won as exhibition support fund to participate in the Korea Artist Prize exhibition held at MMCA, Korea. In the second-round evaluation, a final winner will be announced based on the exhibition with vast capability and stunning achievement. Additionally, SBS will air documentaries to illuminate the oeuvres of the participating artists.

For a clear and fair selection process, the exhibition steering committee, consisting of established art professionals, operates the fundamental system for two years. This steering committee selects 10 recommenders each year. These recommenders represent the highly selective pool of critics, scholars, curators, and contributors of art magazines. After an extensive discussion, the 10 recommenders yield a selection of 6~10 artists. Korea Artist Prize does not hold limitations on the age and artistic genre of the selected artists and it only requires artist’s significant contribution to Korean contemporary art with creating new dialogue within the international audience. The steering committee also invites directors and independent curators from various international art institutions to judge these nominated artists throughout the two rounds of evaluation processes in selecting the final winner.

The SBS Foundation and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea hereby wishes Korea Artist Prize to become a path for Korean contemporary art to communicate with the wide range of audience. For this, we will strive to assist and promote artists leading the contemporary art trend and discourse of Korea.

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.