2017
《2017 Korea Artist Prize》
Do Hwajin (Curator / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)
The Korea Artist Prize is the most prestigious award for recognized Korean artists. It is organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) and the SBS Foundation, and it reaches its 6thedition in 2017. The Prize promotes the quality of Korean modern art culture and impulses the presentation of works specially produced for the occasion. It supports talented artists who have excelled within the Korean contemporary art context. The prize is for living artists who display new and experimental qualities. These artists create issues and discourses that suggest a promising direction in art circles right around the world.
The Korea Artist Prize puts high priority on fair and open selection and support for artists. All of this is aimed at a substantive yet down-to-earth sponsorship program that is centered around the art scene and can respond flexibly to the needs of contemporary art. This year, the artists, Sunny Kim (b. 1969), Kelvin Kyungkun Park (b. 1978), Bek Hyunjin (b. 1972) and Song Sanghee (b. 1970) were selected. They are recognized for their artistic talents in Korea and abroad with works of various themes and forms such as paintings, films, and installations. The steering committee selected a group of 10 specialists who then chose the four artists. After that, a jury composed of Korean and international specialists selected the four aforementioned artists through a portfolio review as well as studio visits. These chosen artists will display their new works at the most prominent galleries of MMCA Seoul. The jury will hold a second screening in December, through which the final winner will be announced.
At Gallery 1, Sunny Kim has organized paintings and installations under the theme of Leap in the Dark. She draws on the psychological domain regarding underlying and forgotten memories into a real space. The paintings present a “perfect image” in harmony with objects, film and sound. Bek Hyunjin’s UnemploymentBankruptcyDivorceDebtSuicide Rest Stop represents a refuge, a resting area, and a place for meditation as well as a multipurpose space. While becoming involved in a virtual scenario, or a “poem,” about a man’s life, viewers experience and complete a play on their own.
In the area (with 14-meter-high ceiling) that connects Gallery 1 with Gallery 2, Kelvin Kyungkun Park presents a crowd of robots moving uniformly with light and colors responding to their motions, under the theme of Mirror Organs. Through this, Park throws powerful questions about the condition of humans who become collective and alienated within a system. At Gallery 2, Song Sanghee delicately depicts relations between the end and formation of things through films, photographs and drawings. Together with the film Come back alive baby that talks about death and variation/expansion of rebirth based on the folk tale about a baby commander, viewers will hear unfamiliar greetings in front of the blue monochrome wall containing images of tragic explosions.
Sunny Kim
Sunny Kim (b. 1969) recomposes images that recall lost and insecure human memories into painting form. She then further constructs a temporarily paused “fabricated space” where memories or imagination beyond those images repeat the process of creation and dissipation. It is a place where the process, of restoring that which has disappeared from the reality of life to its rightful position, is reenacted. Kim collects the images of “girls in uniform” from her limited childhood memories in Korea, and attempts to realize the unachievable “perfect image”. She does this through an acutely self-conscious method of appropriation and elimination, by juxtaposing traditional embroidery and other conventional images while also creating landscapes where the girls in uniform are absent.
This exhibition presents what the artist has created and situations she has engaged in to date, paintings of landscapes completed through new explorations, together with a rearrangement of various themes, paintings, objects, and video within a three-dimensional structure. She thus presents a journey by which the different works establish relationships with one another, while also creating their own separate narratives. Under the theme of Leap in the Dark, paintings, video, and objects are synchronized in three integrated spaces to generate unfamiliar images and memories, thereby creating a living environment. Viewers walking in the dark experience a transitional space, in which the other area interferes with or mediates the senses, until they reach the iconic portraits of the “girls in uniform”.
Bek Hyunjin
Bek Hyunjin (b. 1972) is an “omnidirectional artist” who works as a singer, composer, painter, performance artist, poet, and film director. As anonymous portraits that often appeared in his paintings until a few years ago originated from the desolate atmosphere of ordinary people’s lives, Bek endlessly makes brush strokes as he observes the unstable condition of people living in an uncertain, incomplete world. The geometric, abstract traces on the surfaces of paintings resemble our universal lives, which consist of emotions “that cannot be intact” and thoughts “without any system”. The vivid colors, sounds, and gestures compete with one another, creating strange and intricate scenes. Within his works, it is very important—and enjoyable—to depend on trifling, ordinary thoughts embedded in our everyday lives, and to discover individual icons and indicators while going across one piece, or from one piece to another over, without any discernible purpose.
Bek’s new work, UnemploymentBankruptcyDivorceDebtSuicide Rest Stop, turns the exhibition venue into a refuge, a resting area, and a place for meditation, as well as a multipurpose space. These are pathological phenomena that occur like dominoes throughout Korean society, and all of these horrible, sad, and lonesome conditions are my stories and our stories at the same time. A virtual scenario, or “poem,” about a man is placed at this “Seoul-style rest stop”. While wearing many hats during this project, the artist plays the role of an “enforcer” who has organized the place itself and its user in an almost back and forth way. He allows viewers to become naturally involved in the scenes so that they can experience and complete a play on their own.
Kelvin Kyungkun Park
Kelvin Kyungkun Park (b. 1978) mostly works in film and video as he explores historical archetypes and stories of modern and contemporary Korean history as well uncovering a reverse side of the essence of the era. In his films, Cheonggyecheon Medley, A Dream of Iron, and 1.6 Sec., Park recaptures three-dimensionally the scene and by-products of this period hidden beneath the myth of the rapid growth and economic development of the 1960s. Park’s recent work, Stairway to Heaven, combines performance and video. In this experimental work the movement of emotions involved in making modern relationships fills the crevice of time and space, thus creating harmony and balance.
This exhibition asks powerful questions about the people who become a collective and are alienated within a system. As he recalls his experience of having been subordinate to the needs of the unique condition of the Army, and to the slogan of modernization, Park explores in an in-depth way the “site” where the archetype of today’s Korean men has grown. At the 14-meter-high exhibition venue, robots move uniformly with light and colors responding to the vibrantly moving sculptures.
Song Sanghee
The works of Song Sanghee (b. 1970) start by assuaging the soundless death of those who have absolutely nothing in this world. Through her works, the artist captures those who have been shunned and excluded by the symbolic violence as well as the nameless beings that have constantly existed in different appearances over the years. She calls them to the complex time and space of the past and present through a narrative context that has been solidified through music, video, drawing, text and performance. The series, which was produced in the 2000s, has reenacted structuralized myths and tragic events from the perspective of a modern woman and continually questioned the position of women in society. Since 2010, Song has collected and studied historical records in more delicate, multilayered ways. Based on this, she continues to form relationships by initiating conversations about what has been forgotten in historical scenes and the splendid things remaining in these moments.
Song’s new work Come back alive baby deals with the end of the world, salvation, apocalyptic condition and the energy of new formation based on the folk tale of “a baby commander”, a tragic hero story. Through video, drawing, and text, she presents variations of “a new life force” rising even from the extreme situations of despair and extinction such as one in which individuals are sacrificed for the stability of a country or a group; a great famine and the bankruptcy of a local government; ruins due to the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. On the opposite side is This is the Way the World Ends Not with a Bang but a Whimper, created with a collection of countless explosion images. In this way, the artist juxtaposes the “hollow men” who are accustomed to living in the face of the ongoing reality of catastrophe and the crisis of humankind’s co-destruction.
