The DOOSAN Yonkang Foundation announced on October 16 that visual artist Yeoreum Jeong (b. 1994) and director Kang Boreum were selected as the 15th DOOSAN Yonkang Art Award winners.

Each recipient will receive a cash prize of 30 million KRW, with Yeoreum Jeong also receiving 80 million KRW to cover the costs of her exhibition at DOOSAN Gallery, as well as residency fees, living expenses, and airfare for an overseas residency.

Established in 2010, the DOOSAN Yonkang Art Award supports young artists under the age of 40 with high growth potential in the fields of performing arts and visual arts. As of 2024, a total of 44 artists and teams from these fields have been awarded.

For the 2024 award, the slate of recommended artists comprised eight individuals, predominantly artists in their late thirties who have practiced studio art for approximately ten years. Notably, there was an outstanding number of artists working with new media, such as video and sound, as well as traditional media, such as sculpture. The juries stated that they selected Jeong based on her "potential for development."

Yeoreum Jeong began a professional art practice immediately after finishing her undergraduate studies in 2020. Having presented at numerous film festivals, Yeoreum Jeong has demonstrated vigorous practice despite her relatively brief career. Her work, which explores themes of war, nationhood, visual apparatus, and the relationship between the representation of places and memory through the medium of video, explores places over a long time and deftly intertwines autobiographical experiences and observations to draw out the visible and invisible aspects of given locations.

Here, while her method of narration presents the places and times as personal, it simultaneously exposes the underlying system structures of the history and capital embedded in those locations. Additionally, Yeoreum Jeong's fluid exploration and integration of self-shot scenes, historically contextualized found footage, and technically created 3D imagery underscores her exceptional and illustrious sensibility in video production and narrative construction.

References

• 두산아트센터(DOOSAN Art Center), [두산아트센터] 두산연강재단 두산아트센터 ‘제15회 두산연강예술상’ 시상식 개최, 2024.10.16 

Ji Yeon Lee has been working as an editor for the media art and culture channel AliceOn since 2021 and worked as an exhibition coordinator at samuso (now Space for Contemporary Art) from 2021 to 2023.