The Seoul Museum of Art has named Hiwa K and Anocha Suwichakornpong as co-recipients of the 2025 SeMA–HANA Media Art Award, and Ernest A. Bryant III as the recipient of the Honorary Award.
 
The sixth edition of the award was announced by Seoul Museum of Art Director Eunju Choi. It was adjudicated by head of the jury, Mika Kuraya (Director of Yokohama Museum of Art); scholars Elena Vogman and Youngbin Kwak; the Biennale’s Artistic Directors (Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis); and Eunju Choi.

Hiwa K, co-recipient of the Media Art Award, is an artist who migrated from Kurdistan in northern Iraq to Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Working across sculpture, video, and performance, he draws on personal experiences and oral forms to narrate alternative histories and to question dominant narratives of power.
 
Commissioned for the Biennale, You Won’t Feel a Thing (2025) is a single channel video that unfolds from the personal experience of the artist. In telling this story, the artist questions how the corporate logics embedded in Western medicine—“invasive, like the wars brought to Kurdistan”—have marginalized local practices.
 
The jury admired the work’s representation of the artist not as “a superhuman with special talents, but as an ordinary individual with a vulnerable body.” Its attention to the corporate monopolization of healing also resonated with the exhibition’s attention to the consequences of separating material from spirit, body from mind.

Anocha Suwichakornpong, co-recipient of the Media Art Award, is a filmmaker whose work often engages with events and narratives inspired by Thai society. She has also continued sustained efforts to support Southeast Asian cinema, including co-founding the film production company Electric Eel Films with fellow Thai artists and filmmakers.
 
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s commissioned work, Narrative (2025), stages a meeting between people who lost relatives during the 2010 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok and who continue to seek justice despite fifteen years of obstruction by the Thai government.
 
The jury commended the work for what it reveals of the operations of trauma and memory, which illuminated the exhibition’s broader enquiry into film as a medium through which to access unconscious processes.

The honorary mention was introduced this year to reaffirm the award’s mission of encouraging artists working in diverse media. In keeping with the award’s original purpose of encouraging the sustained practice and growth of emerging artists, the Honorary Award was presented to Ernest A. Bryant III, an interdisciplinary artist and critic.
 
The artist has continuously explored the roles that art and artworks play across diverse cultures, the relational dynamics and interpretive possibilities generated through the “gaze” exchanged between artworks and audiences, and the influence produced in the interactions among images, objects, rituals, and society.
 
Self-Medication (2005) is an interactive sculpture inspired by early twentieth-century Kongo Nkisi figures that dramatizes the encounter between different systems of medicine, belief, and magic. The jury highlighted Bryant’s use of sculptural forms embedded with monitors, prompting reflection on the meaning of encounter. They also praised his proposal of “another economy of generosity and sharing beyond capitalist value systems.”

Head of the jury Mika Kuraya stated: “The jury focused on the award’s mission of supporting the practice of living artists. We discussed the sociopolitical dimensions of the curatorial theme and its relationship to capitalism and advanced technologies, making these complex entanglements a central criterion. With the Biennale featuring a significant number of moving-image works, we sought to maintain balance by not privileging any single medium.”

References

• 서울시립미술관 보도자료 (Seoul Museum of Art Press Release)