Hyundai Motor Company has been supporting the works of numerous artists through different art institutions with the aim of providing a variety of experiences to a larger audience.

Hyundai Motor Company, the largest automobile manufacturer in Korea, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art entered into a large-scale partnership in November 2013 to commemorate the opening of the museum’s Seoul branch.

In the announcement, Hyundai promised a total of 12 billion KRW (Korean won) to the museum for ten years beginning in 2014, including 9 billion KRW for exhibitions by established artists and 3 billion KRW for exhibitions by young and emerging artists. It was one of the first large-scale, long-term sponsorships by an enterprise to support artists in the country.

Based on its corporate mission to create a “sustainable, human-centered future” through its products, Hyundai Motor Company has been providing various cultural and artistic supports. Instead of opening its own art museums or galleries, Hyundai has been supporting the works of numerous artists through different art institutions with the aim of providing a variety of experiences to a larger audience.

The company has entered into two partnerships with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) to support the artistic activities of established and emerging Korean artists.

MMCA Hyundai Motor Series for Established Korean Artists

On March 6, Yeondoo Jung was selected as the artist for the 2023 edition of the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series exhibition, which is sponsored by Hyundai Motor Company and organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Every year, the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series selects one Korean artist or group with a solid reputation in the art world both inside and outside Korea. Hyundai has been supporting the museum with up to 900 million KRW each year to provide the selected artists with the opportunity to create large-scale new works. Through this partnership, Hyundai and the MMCA seek to maximize the artist’s capabilities, establish a new turning point for the artist’s work, and, at the same time, infuse vitality into Korean contemporary art. Moreover, the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series aims to broaden the horizons of Korean contemporary art and increase the international recognition of these Korean artists.

The MMCA Hyundai Motor Series first invited Lee Bul in 2014, followed by Ahn Kyuchul in 2015, Kimsooja in 2016, IM Heung-soon in 2017, Choi Jeong-Hwa in 2018, Park Chan Kyong in 2019, Haegue Yang in 2020, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho in 2021, and Choe U-Ram in 2022.

This year’s artist, Yeondoo Jung (b. 1969), has received numerous good reviews from both the Korean and international art worlds for his works encompassing photography, video, and installation that question the relationship between reality, image, illusion, and the individual and society.

Jeong will exhibit four new works, including a video installation, at the MMCA Seoul’s upcoming MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2023 exhibition, which will run from September this year to February 2024. This will be the artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition at the MMCA after the 2007 Korea Artist Prize exhibition.

Project Hashtag for Emerging Korean Artists

Launched in 2019, Project Hashtag is a five-year partnership between Hyundai Motor Company and the MMCA to discover talented Korean creators who will lead the next generation of artists. The program aims to provide participants with opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration by selecting creators from various backgrounds, such as artists, curators, and researchers. In addition, the program intends to present a new discourse on art museum exhibitions, reproduction methods, the production and distribution of artworks, and communication through art.

The selected creator or team receives a 30 million KRW grant along with a studio (Changdong Residency) and the opportunity to exhibit their artworks at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.

The program borrows the hashtag (#) concept to reflect the program’s purpose. On social media, hashtags are used to connect completely different feeds through a keyword and are able to create an infinite number of contexts among random texts. For this purpose, Project Hashtag includes not only visual arts, such as painting, sculpture, new media, film, and design architecture, but also other art fields, such as music, cooking, modern dance, linguistics, biology, physics, poetry, novels, and hypertext.

Project Hashtag 2022 is currently on view at the MMCA through April 9. The exhibition showcases the projects of Lost Air, which explores the geopolitical significance of party spaces in the Korean underground performance world, and Crypton, which presents a virtual tourist destination called Koko Killing Island to compare today’s landscape, where the sense of place has disappeared. The Project Hashtag 2022 exhibition presents the problems of reality that young creators are currently facing in the face of the pandemic, analyzes them from a new perspective, and seeks experimental and possible solutions.

References

• 국립현대미술관(The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, MMCA)
  
• 현대자동차그룹(Hyundai Motor Group)