Artist Kim YoungEun has been selected as the recipient of the 《Korea Artist Prize 2025》, co-presented by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and the SBS Foundation.
 
Established in 2012, 《Korea Artist Prize》 is Korea’s preeminent art award. Each year, four skilled visual artists who focus on contemporary aesthetic and social issues are chosen as finalists and provided with opportunities to create and exhibit new works, with one among them selected as the final awardee. This year, the exhibition featured Kim Jipyeong, Im Youngzoo, Unmake Lab, and the final awardee, Kim YoungEun.

The final awardee, Kim YoungEun, regards sound and listening as political products. Over the years, the artist has focused on specific histories and the distinctive modes of listening embedded within them, developing multidisciplinary practices centered on sound.
 
Grounded in the ethnographic potential of sound, Kim’s work closely captures sounds accumulated across different places and times, reimagining everyday landscapes from new perspectives that often go unnoticed.
 
In recent works such as Listening Guests (2025) and Go Back To Your (2025), Kim explores the processes through which communal ways of life—extending beyond the individual—are formed within the conditions of migration and translation inherent to diaspora.

Gridthiya Gaweewong, a jury member and Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Thailand, remarked that “it was impressive how social themes such as migration are connected to personal experiences.”
 
Ahn Soyeon, jury member and Artistic Director of Atelier Hermès, commented that Kim is “an extremely important artist who works with sound within the field of visual art, and whose work stands out for its sensitive capture of the social and political contexts embedded in sound.”
 
Jordan Carter, Curator and Co-Department Head at the Dia Art Foundation in the United States, stated, “The work sheds light on its conceptual aspects very effectively, and although it does not foreground visual spectacle, it ultimately possesses a remarkable strength.”

The 《Korea Artist Prize 2025》 selected its final award recipient following a public, audience-participatory panel discussion titled “Artist–Jury Dialogue” held on January 13, and a final closed-door jury deliberation on January 14. The selected artist is named the “Korea Artist Prize 2025” and receives an additional grant of 10 million KRW. The exhibition remains on view at the MMCA Seoul, through February 1.

References

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