2012

《2012 Korea Artist Prize》

KI, Hey-Kyung
(Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)

Co-organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, and the SBS Foundation, the annual ‘Korea Artist Prize’ serves as a stepping stone for promising Korean artists as they progress into the international art scene, assisting them in the realization of their potential and promoting the vision of Korean contemporary art. Following in the spirit of the Museum’s previous Artist of the Year exhibition, the Korea Artist Prize is a practical support system for the arts that responds to the needs of the contemporary art world by focusing on sponsoring artists.
For the 2012 Korea Artist Prize Exhibition, artists were selected and reviewed by a committee of 10 artists and a panel of 5 judges from Korea and abroad. Four recipients including Gimhongsok, Yeesookyung, Minouk Lim and artist duo MOON Kyungwon and JEON Joonho were selected as ‘SBS Foundation Sponsored Artists,’ and are featured in the 2012 Korea Artist Prize Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, from August 31^st to November 11^th, 2012.
2012 Korea Artist Prize Exhibition is not given a specific theme. This year the artists were asked to present works which they had conceived in mind yet were unable to manifest due to practical reasons. As a result, the exhibition consists of four individual projects with distinct subjects rather than being organized under one theme.
This exhibition — which is more like a group of four solo exhibitions — presents five Korean artists in their forties, who are living ‘right now and right here’ in Korea. Each artist presents his or her own unique perception and interpretation of various issues in contemporary society. The works present personal issues, ask questions about the value or significance of art, and sometimes propose alternative ways of looking at the way we live.
2012 Korea Artist Prize Exhibition hopes to present an opportunity to reflect on the age in which we live, through works that explore obscure facets of our society through a common consciousness of current times.

Gimhongsok : People Objective—Wrong Interpretations

The idea of “political correctness” conjures up when encountering work by Gimhongsok. Not limited to any one specific genre, his work involves a conceptual process delivered through a variety of medium, including installation, performance and video. They address the question of both the publicness and individual dignity that must be maintained in a society, as well as issues of unrecognizable violence and oppression inherent in our everyday life.
Such themes coursing through Gimhongsok’s work might sound theoretical, but what the viewer first discovers when faced with one of his works is less the concept, but the humor. His art contains the power to arrest the attention of the audience and lead them to literally burst into giggles and enjoy the work. Intentional or not, such charm resides in the performances staged by Gim, ones that induce the viewers to develop a form of camaraderie and come to participate. However, the moment one turns away from viewing his art—that is, as soon as one steps outside the context of the work—this camaraderie becomes reversed.
Whatever this state is called, it originates from discovering a sense of one’s shame or relief in the giggles they sounded in viewing the work. Such emotions result when the viewer realizes that he has failed to recognize the conflict lurking behind the situations presented by the artist, even when such situation might be something that is familiar to — or even empirically experienced by — the viewer. The viewer is enlightened when he comes to recognize the oppression and violence that he had initially failed to recognize behind the awkward sense of connection with the work, and the fact that in such situation, he was both the victim and the perpetrator.
For the 2012 Korea Artist Prize, Gimhongsok presents People Objective—Wrong Interpretations, which consists of three rooms titled ‘Room of Labor,’ ‘Room of Metaphor’ and ‘Room of Manners.’ Gim’s different narratives about the three rooms, based on the three keywords of labor, metaphor and manner, are delivered to the audience through a performer acting as a docent.
Through this project, Gim challenges the preconceived notions about art in general and prompts us to rethink the social consensus that contextualizes contemporary art as art. Gim’s anecdotes shed light on the various contexts surrounding an art work, such as its significance and approach, as well as all kinds of labor involved in its process of creation, exhibition, communication and circulation. By doing so, Gim presents an opportunity to take a glimpse into the interwoven network of social economic and cultural system that entangles the art world.
The traditional objects in People Objective—Wrong Interpretations are merely a medium that connects the artist’s ideas and the audience, as what the artist is trying to convey is actually through what is being delivered through the docent-performer. In this sense, the performer’s act as the docent is what completes Gim’s work, or is the art work itself. While the docent may seem to be clarifying the work in question through the information, the artist is using the docent to spread the formal presence of the work, thereby prompting the audience to reconsider the current state of contemporary art world.

MOON Kyungwon∙JEON Joonho : Voice of Metanoia—Two Perspectives

MOON Kyungwon and JEON Joonho collaborated for two-and-a-half years on their project News from Nowhere, which was inspired by the fundamental question in the function of art. This joint project was a process through which they came to recognize their own involuntary participation in the market economy in which everything is reduced to and evaluated for its capital value. They sought to claim the value of art work and the raison d’être of art before an art work becomes a commodity through the factors that drive the capitalist market economy.
News from Nowhere is a project inspired by the eponymous utopian novel authored in the late 19^th century by William Morris(1834-1896), who famously led the Arts and Crafts movement. With his remark that “art is not a mere adjunct of life, which free and happy men can do without, but the necessary expression and indispensable instrument of human happiness,” Morris envisioned art in his utopic future society as a necessity of human life, that is, as artworks interconnected with human existence, combined with a social system which allows such a condition. While Morris portrayed his outlook on art through his novel, Moon and Jeon, inspired by this novel by Morris, present the process of searching for the answers to their questions on the values of art, rather than presenting their answers. Such search involves interviewing scholars in diverse fields in our society regarding the current values or future vision, collaborating with architects, designers and technicians to materialize the artists’ own definition of art, or producing video works that reflect values of art.
As a follow-up to News from Nowhere, the work submitted by the pair in this exhibition is titled Voice of Metanoia—Two Perspectives. This work proposes the notion that art is a design to transform the human consciousness, which is an idea that has been dealt with in MOON and JEON’s previous projects.
The interdisciplinary works which include installations, drawing and video works in the exhibition demonstrate the artistic form of our time. Through installation works and color systems that reflect renowned exhibition posters, MOON and JEON propose a certain ground which art should maintain in this day and age that runs rampant which conceptual terminology as opposed to visual language. Rather than trying to define the nature and role of art, however, MOON and JEON calmly proclaim the historical fact that art has always functioned to expand the horizon of human consciousness.
The video work tracks down William Guest, sent to the present from the future with the mission to grasp the function and essence of art, while he visits museums and discovers the inherent human pursuit for beauty in an environment seemingly devoid of it. Retracing his course of travel, we end up discovering art that has been defined by our times, which we find both convincing and perplexing.
The condition of art which Guest arrives at is precisely a portrait of our reality. In this regard, the way of looking at art as proposed by MOON and JEON’s work hopefully yields an opportunity for the audience to reconsider the nature, passion and significance of art which has always been pursued by humanity.

An exploration into Yeesookyung’s oeuvre leads us into contemporary art history blended with her own personal history. Korean art in the 1980s was largely divided into Modernism which denied content within works of art and, in opposition, the more socially-engaged ‘Minjung Art’ which primarily consisted of outcries towards the realities of society. In the latter half of 1980s, this art world once roughly bisected into fine and social activist art gradually began to bear a younger generation of artists with studios clustered in the university district of Hongik University, whose works of personal narratives differed distinctly from the mainstream art in both form and concept. While the preceding generation had focused on artistic discourse distanced from reality, as well as on meta-discourse regarding peoples or nations, these younger artists began to take note of the trivialities of their surroundings.
Yee’s earlier works were in line with the avant-garde consciousness of this younger generation of artists dubbed ‘Hongpang.’ This nature is manifested in the use of icons originating in pop culture, fairy-tale like narratives, questionnaires featuring a stark exposure of common stereotypes and performances based on those surveys from her earlier art. Rebelling against the mainstream art world that propagandized elitist Modernism, such trends in the art of the new generation heralded the genesis of contemporary art today.
While Yee’s early works were mainly conceptual based on everyday life, she started to focus more on works about her personal history by mid-2000s, through by a series of works entitled Translated Vases. Beginning with fragments of broken porcelain whose existence was denied by the potter, the artist reassembled them from a novel perspective and provided a finishing touch of gold leaf, thus granting them a new form. Transforming discarded and unwanted fragments into a new form, this work signifies the artist’s efforts to discover the potential in what is discarded, and requires a new way of perceiving objects. As suggested in the title Translated Vase, this work, which is a “translation” of a different context with regard to the value of existence, presents a process through which the artist heals not only the object but also herself.
Constellation Gemini, the work submitted by Yee for this exhibition, is an extension of this kind of work. At the center of the exhibition space that creates a bilateral symmetry stands a 12-sided pedestal upon which are placed a thousand fragments of her Translated Vases. The thousand pieces, a symbol of plethora, occupy the center of the exhibition room like a constellation. Unlike in previous works, all the fragments of porcelain, in varied stages ranging from incomplete and shattered to transformed works, are assembled to create a unified work of art. The presentation of art such as this signifies a shift in the longstanding methods employed in Yee’s art. As Yee mentioned, this change comes as the result of accepting the discarded broken form as it actually is, and also signifies that the artist has arrived at a point where her thoughts are not hindered by her material or subject.
The exhibition subject of Yeesookyung’s work is “symmetry”, which references the work process involved in producing her perfectly bilateral symmetrical paintings which mobilize both hands. This concept, which begins as an attribute in a personal method of production, goes beyond something personal and extends to the symmetrical ‘Kyobangchoom’ (traditional Korea dance), scroll works and installations. These symmetrical images — symbolizing elements that are identical but different, the self but the other, singular but simultaneously double — fill the exhibition space while healing and bridging gaps between the fragmented self and other. Yee’s work discovers the other in the self and the self in the other, accepting the unity between the self and other and thus acknowledging the presence of the other.

Minouk Lim : The Possibility of the Half

Minouk Lim’s work is a portrayal of the lives and narratives of everyday people, such as the daily life of delivery men or taxi drivers one might come across on the streets. Lim’s work capture aspects of everyday life that is so mundane for one to even feel the need to think about them. Fascinated by today’s social issues that are encrusted in mundaneness such as the dissonant relationship between individual and collectivity, and problems concerning redevelopment and social minority, Lim presents the narratives of her observations through installations, videos and performance works.
Lim’s works evoke different responses from the viewer according to his or her own specific circumstance. While some may see traces of life in suffering, others might sense the rough but warm human compassion. Some might also admit to having become enlightened of the society’s hidden truths, prejudices and irrationality that should be solved. Such responses are reflective of Lim’s methodology in her art practice.
Although aspiring to be the present-day Bartleby, inspired by the main character Bartleby in Herman Melville(1819-1891)’s novel Bartleby the Scrivener, Lim has recognized her fateful analogy to Sisyphus who toils — climbing a mountain that has to be climbed again and again — with the weight of life bestowed upon her. Her works characteristically assume a method which, rather than presenting a confident response to the stories under her observation, leads the viewer to reflect upon and question oneself. Such trait in Lim’s art practice allows the audience to delve deeper into the varied layers of her art, thereby leading to a more profound insight into life.
This exhibition presents Lim’s work titled The Possibility of the Half, which was inspired by witnessing North Koreans wailing over the death of their leader Premier Kim Jung-il at his funeral. Lim discovers a sense of irony in the sobbing citizens as if the whole entire country has become a massive theatrical stage, and focuses on the role of ideology and media that aggravates such a theatrical sight. Ironically, the truth has been censored and fabricated by the media — which is supposed to report the truth — and what is being reported, as opposed to what is actually real, has become the yardstick for judgment of the truth.
On the other hand, discovering something primitive in the weeping citizens in a seemingly eternal theatrical situation, Lim aspires towards a world in which the ordinary people can again become the subject of the news. Uncensored news by ordinary people signifies a utopia that can never be arrived at through the media. The reversed news, the free newscaster’s seat, and the script open for anyone whoever sits in the newscaster’s seat all allude to a situation that would never happen in reality unless it were a broadcasting accident.
The subverted news charged with the possibility for change is visualized through soft materials that are characteristic of Lim’s work, such as fur, hair and feathers, as well as fluid image captured with an infrared camera. These materials and images with qualities of touch stand in contrast with attributes of sight that have led the birth and development of media. Going on further, these materials and images, combined with the primitiveness in the weeping North Koreans and the ideal situation of ordinary people delivering the news, make up a destructed news scene that signifies the possibility of idealism to which we have until now been oblivious.