The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), has selected Kim YoungEun, Kim Jipyeong, Unmake Lab, and Im Youngzoo as the four sponsored artists/artist groups for the Korea Artist Prize 2025, an exhibition and award program co-organized by the MMCA and the SBS Foundation. This year’s four finalists, all female artists, are actively working both domestically and internationally across various media, including video, installation, sculpture, and VR.

Kim YoungEun (b. 1980) creates artwork that focuses on sound and listening as political and historical products and forms of practice. For this exhibition, she will be creating a new work that examines ways of listening in specific communities holding migration and diaspora experiences.

Kim Jipyeong (b. 1976) has critically interpreted the traditional thoughts and way of seeing found in the concept and technique of dongyanghwa (Eastern traditional painting). Through this, she intends to think outside of the Western-centered modernity about the reality of the division of North and South Korea, the body of women, and ecosystem. Recently, she has focused on revitalizing the meanings of folding screens, scrolls, and albums.

Unmake Lab is a collective formed in 2016 by Choi Binna and Song Sooyon. Since 2020, the group has focused on work that combines Korea’s history of developmentalism with artificial intelligence elements (including datasets, computer vision, and generative neural networks) as they reconstruct the present social and ecological situation into speculative landscapes. In addition to their older work offering a different take on the anthropocentric thinking inherent to emerging technology, the members will also be presenting new work that explores the precariousness of technological non-places.

Im Youngzoo (b. 1982) examines the processes through which superstition, beliefs, and religious faith are accepted and shaped within Korean society and shares them with viewers through a blend of experiences and media including video, installation, performance, virtual reality, and books. As she compares “uncertain beliefs” with scientific and technological development, the artist imagines what lies beyond reality, shaping existential stories about death, apocalypse, and outer space.

Pethick, director of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands; Jordan Carter, a curator at Dia Art Foundation in the United States; Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Thailand; Jang-un Kim, former director of Art Sonje Center; Soyeon Ahn, artistic director of Atelier Hermès; and, as ex officio members, MMCA director Kim Sunghee and MMCA curator Woo Hyunjung. The final committee will consist of the six members besides the MMCA curator.

This year’s exhibition will take place at MMCA Seoul from Friday, 29 August 2025, to Sunday, 22 February 2026. It will offer a rich display of each artist’s body of work, including newly conceived and proposed creations as well as older ones that show their artistic journeys to date.

References

• 국립현대미술관 보도자료 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) Press Release)

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.