2025
Throwing Stones Over and Beyond the Line
Woo Hyunjung (Curator / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)
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 layered view of the artist’s world, a change was made by showcasing existing major works alongside new works. This more narrative approach to the exhibition has led us to question how Korea Artist Prize differs from a four-artists (teams) four-color solo exhibition or (early) retrospective more responsibly than before, and to wonder whether the single winner, who is announced after the Artist & Jury Talk, might have the effect of drawing more attention to the “award” itself than to the many facets of Korea Artist Prize. The changes in the nature of the exhibition and the project’s process leads us to question what Korea Artist Prize can signify as an exhibition.
If we leave behind the process and framework of Korea Artist Prize, we are left with four artists (teams). Each of them is in the process of expanding their art world in different languages, and the exhibition is obliged to present the audience with a tightly knit collection of their cutting-edge concerns at the closest possible distance. Korea Artist Prize 2025 actively seeks to reveal the common grounds in attitude rather than the commonality of subject matter among the four (teams), as well as the difference in direction rather than the difference in strategy. Instead of gathering the artists in loose associations and ambiguous neighborhoods, an active arrangement is proposed, looking forward to the subsequent steps that will occur. In line with this direction, the exhibition invites the artists to an imaginary playground modeled after the traditional Korean folk game Sabangchigi (hopscotch). This game, also commonly referred to as hopscotch, is practiced by drawing lines on the ground and throwing small stones to make your own territory. To “defend the land” means to “secure your world,” so the land is also the “self.” While the “competition” through occupancy in hopscotch cannot be completely erased (which is the same for this exhibition), “boundary” can be cited as an equally important value. Occupancy in art should be less about how much you take and more about how you encounter and move through other things. Making exceptions to the rules and building life on someone else’s turf. Hopscotch is a fierce yet open-ended game. While acknowledging the tension between play and rules, Korea Artist Prize 2025 recognizes competition as a contest and interprets it as a fluid state of movement that drives social negotiation.
If 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the play refer to the number of participants, their ranking, and the order of participation, then 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the exhibition can be expanded to signify the spatial indexes reached by the four artists (teams)’ experiments and the coordinates stepped on by the viewers. What kind of lines will be drawn by the stones thrown by Korea Artist Prize 2025 featured artists Kim YoungEun, Im Youngzoo, Kim Jipyeong, and Unmake Lab? If we consider the commonality of the aforementioned attitudes and the differences in direction, these artists gathered together as “the ones who look for the invisible at the boundaries, but also look towards different places.” Their plays which have different purposes will be enriched as it embodies the ways in which they step on, cross and inhabit the boundaries they create.
Politics of Listening
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.
What power can be unleashed from (heard) sound and (attentive) listening? What can we discover in non-verbal acoustic signals, background sounds that do not dictate meaning, or noise that has been targeted for cancellation? The invisible and intangible act of listening acquires substance through history-based memory and the imagination that fills in the gaps. The artist’s methodology, which she calls “sonic ethnography,” is a study that explores how a particular community’s way of listening is shaped in entanglement with its cultural and political context. In this exhibition, she pays particular attention to the way diasporic communities remember and perceive sound in the context of “migration” and “translation.” For the artist, diaspora is not a physical result of movement but a site where the conditions of senses are reconfigured. When surrounded by unfamiliar environments and sounds, listening always demands negotiation and mediation, drawing on active practices to occupy space, interpret the world, and reconstruct reality. The politics of senses that arise in this process touches upon fear, disgust, alienation, as well as the possibilities of recovery, solidarity, and resistance.
Kim YoungEun sees listening as a form of knowledge production and a strategy of decolonization. She deconstructs the sounds we are accustomed to hearing as well as the technologies and institutional norms that enable them, then reads through the traces of power hidden within. This has the power to make us question how sounds from the past are heard in the present, and to imagine how future listeners might reinterpret them. Kim YoungEun asks us to listen differently. There is something we are missing, and these are the descendants of countless stories that have been lost. The sounds she invokes in her works are, after all, the product of a keen political sensibility that makes the unheard audible and brings the inaudible back into the world.
Narratives that Fill the Void of Belief
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.
Her main interests are the boundaries between science and superstition, rationality and irrationality, faith and technology. Repetition, error, superimposition, and leaps are strategically placed in her works to satirize the myth of certainty in the language of science. For example, in her early work where a hand rests on top of a stone over an alcohol lamp in a practice framed like a scientific experiment, the performer’s physical pain was prolonged indefinitely in the video, mixing the objectivity of science with the devotion of faith (Test_Material (2016)). Here, science loses its authority, and superstition becomes an object of embrace and humor instead of being discarded and criticized. By invoking the phrase “certainty of uncertainty,” she exposes how the seemingly objective dichotomies upheld by modern science and rationalism are, in fact, rhetorical acts of faith.
Since the pandemic, the artist has embraced advanced technologies, such as VR and artificial intelligence, to explore beliefs about the afterlife. These technologies are recontextualized not as devices that offer the best solutions for the future, but as technologies that have already failed, juxtaposed with practices of the past. 고 故 The Late (2023–2025), which uses an “empty grave” as means of survival, is inspired by the Korean practice of Ga-myo, in which viewers experience a pseudo-VR environment while lying down, or look up at a face on a ceiling monitor that grows old and rejuvenates, and experience other dimensions (heaven, death, and the future) beneath the “ground.” Just as superstition is rooted in irrational desires, technology is a realm of “belief” in the sense that it fulfills the human desire to reach out to outer space. Im Youngzoo calls the “empty grave” a “space with real power” that makes us see the invisible and transports us to places we can’t go.1
Rewriting Art History with “Absent” Tradition
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.
For Kim Jipyeong, the dichotomies of “East/West” and “tradition/modern” were already part of a hybrid process. For example, Chaekgeori (2001–2012) transformed the patriarchal realm of upper-class “elitism” into a space for modern women’s play, while Michae Sansu (Camouflaged Landscape) (2006–2011) combined the camouflage grammar used for military purposes with traditional Sansuhwa (landscape painting) to simultaneously reveal both the Cold War and the landscape of development. The artist is wary of reading “tradition” as an opponent of the “modern” or treating the past as a way to fill in lost traditions. Instead, she reads tradition as a space that is open because it is empty, a gap seen as a productive void, a birthplace for new narratives. It is a space filled with stories written by those who have been overlooked or disappeared from official art history. “Non-registered art history,” as she calls it, has the capacity to summon the people from literature, maps, folk tales, myths, novels, and films, and transforms the confusion and frustration into expectations and possibilities as they encounter and collide with the contemporary.
Taking notice that the names of the folding screen parts and the composition of women’s hanbok (Korean traditional cloth) are the same, the artist brings marginalized figures from history—shamans, grandmothers, female vocalists, mourners, and walkers—onto the stage to create an aural illusion in which fragmented voices echo in the silence (Polyphonic Chorus (2023–2025)), or invokes ancient East Asian turtle mythology to juxtapose cosmic time and ecological crisis (Cosmic Turtle (2025)). Tradition is redefined as a multidimensional database where time, language, and senses intersect, because in the end, the “absent” traditions she experiments with can only survive by being rewritten in their absence, and only through this process of re-narrativization can they acquire contemporaneity. So instead of mourning the absence and disconnection of tradition, her work is more of a manifesto in support of discord and disruption. Look at the “absence.” That’s where the “absent” will come to life.
Machine Vision on Humans
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.”
One of Unmake Lab’s strategies is to build speculative datasets, which they call “Dataset-ting.” This is the act of appropriating a dataset for statistical learning as a cultural tool by interrogating how it is organized and injecting sensory fractures into it, rather than seeing it as a collection of information. Images and data collected from disaster sites or mythical realms are extracted, augmented, and reorganized, and this data becomes the basis of learning for artificial intelligence to produce unexpected results. A world in which warped images are created through endless “deep learning.” The portraits of animals that reflect the world of humans wandering through it, the ketchup-sprinkled stones that are recognized as hot dogs, are ghostly objects that go beyond simple humor to satirize how our cognitive systems are tenuously intertwined with technology. The result of prediction and memory, virtual and real, deflecting to form such a result is what the artists call a “Non-Future,” a tense in which technology’s idealized vision of the future is actually a status quo catastrophe, a frustration that is only undone by our insatiable desire for nature. The non-future which is over before we even get there is an existential problem because there is “no place or time to escape it.”2
As the future guided by algorithms becomes more opaque, Unmake Lab’s work is organized in a way that questions the worldview of a technological society that tries to predict and control everything. The “Non-Future” they construct is a space where the tense of technology is missing, where human logic cannot define it, or where the debris of meaning is left behind. Here, Unmake Lab proves that art can exist in a way that re-sensitizes us to technology. And art in this case becomes an experimental oracle that retraces the world that data is losing.
Hopscotch is a play that is not about moving toward a clear goal, but about moving from space to space, sometimes in circles. Here, the untouched space is a space of possibility that allows for the next opportunity, and the playground is a shared asset for all participants, more valuable together than alone.
Although the title Korea Artist Prize presupposes an “award,” what we hope to witness in this exhibition is not a proof of who is outstanding, but a trajectory of who is starting from where and moving in which direction. Therefore, we invite you to step on this playground and map it with us. To do this, we have prepared square 5.
Taking into consideration the action of stone throwing as the beginning, we hope that your stone will trace a parabola of escapism, over and beyond the boundaries drawn by the four artists (teams).
