2024

Curatorial Essay for the Korea Artist Prize 2024 Exhibition

Jooyeon Lee (Curator / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)

Korea Artist Prize is an award system and support program jointly presented by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and the SBS Foundation. Each year since its inception in 2012 it has shown the potential of Korean contemporary art by selecting four artists to receive support and exhibition opportunities for new artistic creations as well as ongoing assistance with their international activities. For the 10th edition, institutional improvements were introduced with a goal of adding greater depth and meaning to the program by providing a condensed glimpse of each artist’s views and sharing these through multiple channels to create ripples throughout the art world.”

When it comes to the Korea Artist Prize, certain questions inevitably arise. What does it mean to label an artist as being the “artist of the year”? What aspects give them the right to be named as such? Annual award systems in other fields tend to select recipients based on major achievements within that specific year, but the Korea Artist Prize is a bit different. While the idea of “this year” as a temporal unit is clearly indicated in the award’s Korean name, it cannot be said that the decisions relate solely to the year in question. It may be more appropriate to say that “this year” carries a sense not simply of mathematical time, but of what the work signifies today—its “contemporariness.” The use of “this year” raises a discussion about the artist’s perspective, attitude, and methodology and how relevant a message these present in the contemporary context. This may be the reason so many critiques and interpretations follow the exhibition. In a sense, the Korea Artist Prize presents itself along controversial lines to draw attention.

But what if we were to interpret that “controversy” as more of a discussion? Art is inherently a context imbued with the potential to allow different things to come together. When we examine things more closely—while taking into account the fact that the Korea Artist Prize exists in a nebulous area between the conflicting currents of an “award” system and “support” system—we may be able to isolate the measures, goals, and realities. Competition is a means; support is the end. In that sense, the Korea Artist Prize may be understood not as an authoritative institution’s declaration about “which artists we should be paying the most attention to this year,” but as an exhibition that anticipates the encounters and dialogues that arise when we focus on these artists at this moment. The selection of artists and exhibition preparations may appear declarative at first glance, but behind all that, there are intense discussions and considerations involving a great many people, including representatives of the museum and members of the steering and nomination committees and judges’ panel. The exhibition presents itself before a wide variety of people, while drawing these viewers’ questions up to the surface and revealing them. When it operates as a forum not to serve one competition victor’s lone sense of achievement, not to push others out with voices under the shadows, and not to overlook differences in the name of fairness, but to encourage discussions toward a contemporary environment—then the Korea Artist Prize will be able to accomplish its original aims.

As the ones preparing this exhibition, we might hope that the results of these discussions will be more inclusive and serve a greater number of people. The four finalists selected for the 2024 exhibition—Hayoun Kwon, Yang Jung-uk, Jiyoung Yoon, and Jane Jin Kaisen—offer an opportunity to test how rich and layered an understanding of the world we can achieve.

Sculpture as Symptom

The sculptures of Jiyoung Yoon are the results of hidden causes. In a literal sense, this description means that her work is the product of many previous decisions that make full use of the grammar of sculpture. At the same time, it also indicates that her sculptures harbor certain stories or represent the inner workings of the mind. Hidden aspects in terms of form or content are of tremendous importance in understanding her work, but they are not at all immediately apparent. There is only the artwork, piquing the viewer’s curiosity as it operates somewhat like a vestigial organ.

Yoon has said that she creates works based on “the ways in which individuals respond to their given environment and the attitudes they adopt in order to improve their circumstances.” What triggers the work is a sense of discomfort with something that is typically taken for granted. The discomfort may stem from some force that is exerted on the individual against their will, or from some deception that exists even when it cannot easily be seen. The individual’s response to it takes place in and outside the body. It is like a sense of pressure weighing on our chest and causing labored breathing, or an earnest wish (even one based on a mistaken belief) that brings us to our knees. In this way, Jiyoung Yoon’s work focuses inevitably on interactions between what is imposed from outside and what manifests from within. Forgotten anguish is recalled as the sculptures appear before the viewer as masses pierced to their innermost parts, as matter that has torn and crumbled under the strain, and as the residue left after all energy has been exhausted.

If we are never free from these external influences, what does it mean for the individual to work toward a “better” state? In her new work for this exhibition, the artist focuses on ex-votos made when making a wish or expressing gratitude for a wish granted. The sculpture of the body itself represents an ex-voto of a sort, expressing a wish for happiness as it shows the artist’s head molded in substances that contain the consoling voices of friends. In Yoon’s previous works, the material ended up disappearing; here, it transforms into something plastic, something with the active strength to accommodate external influences and change itself. It is akin to the consolation provided by an object that expresses the heartfelt wishes and emotions of friends, regardless of its shape or material. From narratives of the forces that compel us, the work shifts to an account of the forces that sustain us. Having passed through a time of isolation, the sculpture is infused with a sense of warm sincerity.

The Testimony of Virtual Reality

For Hayoun Kwon, virtual reality represents a means of proving an incident’s existence. This may appear a paradoxical way of thinking: besides the contradiction inherent in the words “virtual reality,” it seems irrational to try to provide that something “was” with a medium that appears to rule out the possibility of ensuring truthfulness with photographic images. Yet by using tenacious research and investigation as stepping stones to cross the boundary between the real and virtual, the artist seeks to produce new experiences of memory.

Drawing on virtual time and space allows for the presentation of worlds that we had hitherto been unable to experience. These may include previously inaccessible places, memories that survive only in the minds of others, or events that went unrecorded as part of history. Lack of Evidence uses 3D animation as it endeavors to show the desperate plight of migrants who are unable to present any kind of evidence, while 489 Years applies virtual reality as a medium to access the restricted region of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The Guardians of Jade Mountain, which was newly created for this exhibition, reflects memories of Taiwan’s Bunun people, whose lack of a writing system has placed their very survival in jeopardy. As virtual reality transcends real-world constraints to present things never before experienced, it broadens those experiences into the realm of collective memory.

Through Kwon’s work, we come to reflect on concrete relationships that cannot be reduced to grand concepts such as the “state” or the “enemy.” These include the beautiful natural environment of the DMZ as shown in 489 Years or the stories of friendship transcending national conflict that are observed in The Guardians of Jade Mountain. This approach to showing concrete aspects of reality is an inversion of the strategy in Model Village, a work focusing on a false village built for regime propaganda purposes. In this way, the artist introduces a new kind of usage value to virtual reality. Amid a dearth of evidence, Kwon builds a virtual village for the benefit of a world where unrecorded memories ultimately disappear. She attempts to ford a moat that takes 489 years to cross over completely. As we follow her path step by step into a different reality, our memories become that much richer.

Moving People

Yang Jung-uk creates moving sculptures. Each catches the eye as it moves with its own rhythm. The core aspect, however, lies in the stories behind those movements. Yang’s stories typically start from an image from everyday life, but they are not pure eyewitness accounts—they are imbued with the artist’s own imagination and desires. The things that he wishes to discover in life become stories, and those stories transform in turn into repeating movements.

If Yang’s works embody another desire beyond the hope of discovering certain aspects of life, it has to do with the feelings he seeks to express. Yang describes his own methodology as “assemblage”: connecting objects to imbue new meanings that differ from their original purposes. Like a telephone number carved by construction workers into a concrete wall or a map made randomly of scattered objects that are meant to illustrate something, sculpture for Yang Jung-uk is an object whose usage has been transformed to communicate a message. Although one may be struck by the immense size of the sculptures, the most important elements in those transformational techniques are the feelings and sincerity. After all, it is possible to create anything if we put our heart and soul into something we regard with fondness. Yang’s stories and sculptures emerge from aspects of life that he wishes to discover and his hopes of communicating them, and the results become “fairytales” that cause us to examine ordinary life in a new light.

Yang Jung-uk’s fairytales convey an aesthetic of balancing. For the artist, “balance” is less a suspended state than a constant process of tipping over and being restored once again. To show this process of change, the exhibition divides Yang’s works into those that relate to people and those that relate to landscapes. The ones that focus on people depict the past experiences gradually accumulated within a person’s gestures, considering the profession through which they inevitably became that way. The ones that focus on landscapes show different beings living in harmony even amid their misalignments—just as our body’s movements change depending on our profession, just as we change with the different people we encounter, just as desires transform the purposes of objects and techniques are developed through sincerity. Life is shaped by the countless repeated movements of people striving constantly between hardship and hope. This is why Yang Jung-uk’s sculptures must constantly be moving.

Performing Island

Jane Jin Kaisen’s work Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) portrays an island that is vibrantly alive. Presented in its entirety for the first time in this exhibition, Kaisen’s series Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) consists of seven films, five of which form a spiral around two central films that are positioned back-to-back. The dynamic arrangement of screens, which seem to expand through their connections with their surroundings or return constantly to their center, guides viewers to follow the flow of these forces.

The dynamic quality of Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) is carried over into images filled with the gestures of various subjects—the dancing of divers and songs of a simbang (shaman) as they allay the historical scars harbored within the sea (Offering; Wreckage); the movements of young people resisting the developmentalist mentality that is destroying their island (Burial of This Order); the moving hands of haenyeo (female divers) who have lived as one with the sea (Halmang); children playing on the boundary between this world and the next (Guardians); organisms in the pulsing sea that lies at the center of all these activities (Portal); and the flows of lava embedded deeply in the land (Core). The island and sea are themselves the scenes of performances. Based on the artist’s interdisciplinary research and years of collaboration with local communities, the videos encompass Jeju Island’s unique natural setting and sea culture, shamanistic rituals, history and memories, and contemporary issues.

At a certain point, the videos begin interconnecting. What weaves them together is the sochang: a traditional cloth that has been used throughout a human’s life cycle as everything from a newborn baby’s diaper to a cord for tying coffins. People feel the white fabric, unfolding it, and binding their own bodies with it as they sit on rocks, walk through ruins, and swim in the sea. Among them, the sochang creates a bridge between human beings and nature, life and death, the resistance of a new generation and the knowledge of the ancients. As these different subjects are linked together, the work creates the potential for new relationships and the discovery of alternative lineages. Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) is performative in the sense that it drives an expansion and transformation of understanding by connecting different agents based on a language of gesture in between ritual and performance.

At the end of these connections, Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) overlaps the specific setting of Jeju Island with countless other places. The island of “Ieodo” referenced by the title is one that exists in the collective imagination of Jeju’s people—a potential reality and a place yet to come somewhere beyond the sea. The story it conveys both as the Jeju itself and as an island with the potential to be all places is one that connects endlessly, as if to embrace the entire world.

Each of these artists transforms their media to express a message based on their own unique perspective. Through this exhibition, we can sense the differences that exist among their methodologies. For instance, how different is Hayoun Kwon’s methodology of expressing truth by presenting evidence using virtual spaces from Yang Jung-uk’s willingness to embellish to convey the aspects of life that he desires? How does the spiral formed as Jane Jin Kaisen’s work expands to embrace the world differ from Jiyoung Yoon’s attempts to achieve solidarity by accessing the innermost depths? And what of Yoon and Yang’s differing approaches to the language of sculpture, or the immersive environments constructed in Kaisen and Kwon’s work? Could their perspectives be drawn upon to adopt a different view of the mind, of memory, of our neighbors, or of the world? It is in the hope of achieving something like this that the exhibition initiates its dialogue.