Yunjin Kim (b. 1989), an emerging art critic, has been selected as the sole recipient of the 2025 SeMA–Hana Art Criticism Award.
 
Kim has written extensively on visual art and popular culture, engaging with media such as film and comics. Her work focuses on the tensions and power structures that arise in the encounter between audiences and artworks, and she seeks to capture shared sensibilities that emerge across genres, moving fluidly between different media and forms.

The award-winning essay, “관종의 시대와 자기 노출 전략의 미학: 《지속 가능한 미술관: 미술과 환경》을 중심으로 (The Age of Attention-Seekers and the Aesthetics of Self-Exposure: Focusing on 《Sustainable Museum: Art and Environment》),” offers a new reading of the 2021 exhibition 《Sustainable Museum: Art and Environment》 held at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art through the keywords “attention-seeker” and “obscenity.”
 
The essay notes that the museum’s act of actively exposing exhibition waste as its own flaw mirrors the attitude of “attention-seekers” on social media. It further proposes that such strategies of excessive self-exposure function as a mode of articulation—an “obscenity” that lays bare one’s own vulnerabilities.

The SeMA–Hana Art Criticism Award has been organized biennially since 2015 by the Seoul Museum of Art, with support from Hana Financial Group. The winner receives a 20 million KRW prize and a trophy created by artist Jangyeun Jun, along with the opportunity to conduct the SeMA Art Criticism Research Project over the following two years.
 
As an associated program, a casual talk session examining contemporary Korean art criticism will be held on Friday, December 5 at 1:30 pm in SeMA Hall, located on the first basement level of the Seosomun Main Building.
 
This year’s session, themed “젊은 예술의 오늘 (The Present of Young Art),” will focus on critical discussions surrounding independent art scenes outside institutional frameworks. Additionally, the results of the criticism research project carried out over the past two years by Hangil Jang, the recipient of the 2023 SeMA–Hana Art Criticism Award, will be unveiled for the first time during the event.

References

• 서울시립미술관 보도자료 (Seoul Museum of Art Press Release)